Saturday, September 29, 2007

Survey for Families Opting-Out of Year-Round Schools

Some of the families who opted-out of year-round schools to traditional calendar schools have received a survey from Wake County’s Evaluation and Research department.  The purpose of this survey is to better understand why families chose to opt-out of year-round and modified-calendar schools. The WCPSS staff says they hope that the information will allow the district to better address the concerns of families.

All families who had opted out should have received a form, even if you opted out before Judge Manning’s ruling.  If you opted out and have not received a form, you can request one by calling 850-1863.  The forms are due back by October 12.

One point that was mentioned is that the survey results will be broken down across subgroups of parents. An example that was given is that they’re going to evaluate the results to find out if English-speaking parents and Spanish-speaking parents opted out for different reasons.  Apparently they want to be able to encourage specific “subgroups” to choose YR instead of traditional, since the traditional schools are so incredibly overcrowded.  Breaking the survey results down will allow them to target certain subgroups, but some people I’ve heard from feel this is a form of “stereotyping”.

While I do feel that this is a step in the right direction by attempting to gather information, I am also going to encourage the School System to survey ALL parents in the system.  By asking people their opinions and feelings BEFORE formulating an assignment plan, they’ll have a TRUE understanding of what the families want.

I also believe that what the public really needs to see is a list of those who stayed at their converted school, but wrote “under duress” and similar comments on their consent forms.  (I am one of those)  So many of us decided not to “opt-out” even though we preferred a traditional calendar because we were not told what our traditional option was. In the Spring when the consent forms were turned in,  I was told that “most” of the forms coming back to the school did have those types of comments hand-written on them.  I wonder if there is a way to see those results?

Have you received a form?  What have you heard about this latest action?