Student Satisfaction

 

(Formerly “Customer Satisfaction”)

After creating a Community Values Statement in 2007 and again in 2010 it became clear to the Issaquah PTSA Council that parents and students are strong advocates for the educational product that is received in our district throughout our schools and in every classroom.

The Issaquah PTSA Council has a history of looking for opportunities to work with the district to look at that relationship between students – schools – teachers. For example, we worked on a Middle School Experience Project for three years where we talked, in partnership with the district, to focus groups of parents, students and staff about the cultures at our middle schools at the time and sought innovative ideas to create positive experiences for everyone. Some of the current practices at these schools came out of that work.

Through all of the different projects, work, and experiences we have participated in, it has become clear that student achievement is about much, much more than test scores. Students want to feel safe in their environment, they want to feel like they are noticed and appreciated for who they are, and they want to be challenged.

This current committee will start small looking at student satisfaction in our current system. We will have conversations with school board members, district administrators, a variety of students at all levels, and parents. As these conversations develop we will see correlations to programs that are already in place, areas that we want to improve and expand, and things that are missing.

If you have any questions, please contact the Issaquah PTSA Student Satisfaction Chair:

customer@issaquahptsa.org

Student Satisfaction Committee Meeting Synopsis:

January 26, 2012

Senior Survey – we agreed with most of the input received from a former ISD student about the draft survey. This input was also shared with the District. We thought it might be a good idea to expand this survey into the transition years of 5th and 8th grade.

General – the committee decided to table the idea of a PTSA survey for students and put our focus on immediate advocacy efforts. We will make comment to the School Board about the importance of student input into their educational experience.

January 4, 2012

Focused on reviewing the senior survey questions in preparation for our meeting with the district on Wednesday, January 10.

Some of our questions included:

  • What do we want to do with the data? What are the take-aways? It shouldn’t just be a way to pat ourselves on the back that everyone is relatively happy.
  • Is the plan to do this more than one year?
  • Are we looking at the whole child? How do you measure what is from home influence and what is from school influence? Is this supposed to just reflect their time in Issaquah or K-12? How do you correct for that in analyzing the results?
  • We felt some of the questions needed a “Please explain” to give students an opportunity to express their personal experiences.

November 29, 2011

We began with an overview of how this committee came to be. While our name is “student satisfaction committee” this does not preclude listening to the parent voice but puts the focus on the fact that we want the students’ perspective.

Current Data available to us:

Partnering with the District on new Senior Survey – this committee will work with the district to help develop a new survey that will be administered to high school seniors this spring 2012.

PTSA survey – we will look into developing our own survey for students.