Survey to address school culture

Newton Community School District teachers will be asked to complete a culture survey in the weeks ahead.

One of the main items on the agenda for Monday’s regular NCSD board meeting was a discussion of the Denison Culture Survey implementation to certified staff. The survey, which will have a cutoff date of Oct. 7, will ask Newton teachers and other staff members a series of questions about their work environment, providing the board information about what the district does well and what isn’t being done well.

Chris Pierson of the Heartland Area Education Agency came to Monday’s meeting to talk about the survey. The Heartland AEA first encountered Denison when it had the firm conducted on the Heartland AEA itself a short time ago.

“Yes, the surface of the survey results will be about numbers,” Pierson said. “But it will really be about the story that supports those numbers.”

Pierson said organizations that have few or no issues regarding confusion or underperformance don’t tend to look into surveys of this type. He used a series of elaborate, multi-colored charts to discuss objectives and other elements of the Denison survey, focusing partly on four variables: consistency, sticking to a mission statement, involvement and adaptability.

The NCSD’s mission statement is that the district will do “whatever it takes to ensure all students learn to think, innovate, and succeed.”

The board unanimously decided at its May 9 meeting to go forward with the Denison Culture Survey after hearing multiple presentations about it, but no cost to the district has been made public. The results will be kept confidential.

“Why are we doing this? Because we want to increase our workplace culture so that we can become a highly performing organization,” Pierson said. “It’s always about kids, and kids first.”

NCSD administrators took the survey ahead of teachers and had a conversation about the administration team data. Certified district staff will get a brief email about the survey on Aug. 19, followed by the formal survey on Aug. 26, giving them about six weeks to complete it.

Board members Ann Leonard and Donna Cook said they would like to see the results of the administrators’ survey, as the board had direct administration to proceed with the survey.

“The administrators understood the original project plan was to have all of the data aggregated — not disaggregated by campus or by employment groups,” Pierson said.

Pierson recommended the data not be shared publicly until after the teachers had completed the survey, to avoid influence as teachers complete the survey.

​Board members Ann Leonard and Donna Cook both also wanted to see the administrators results.

“I don’t understand why it has to be such a fight to get this information,” Leonard said.

“I feel like a board view of the survey is important,” Cook said.

Pierson agreed to work with administration to modify the project plan to have greater board engagement as teacher data becomes available. Results should be available from Denison in mid-October, and Heartland AEA will help the NCSD analyze the results to present to the rest of the staff.

Data sharing back to teachers and deeper discussions about the data with the teaching staff is planned as part of the Jan. 9, 2017 professional development day.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com