Revere school board hears about new online survey tool

REVERE – The Revere public schools will be using a new web-based survey instrument called “K-12 Insight” to receive more feedback from the community.Superintendent Dr. Paul Dakin shared information about K-12 Insight to the school committee at Tuesday night?s subcommittee meeting.?It is a culture climate survey instrument,” Dakin said. “It lets us find out what the students, parents and the community think we need and what we should be doing.”The web-based survey instrument would send out questions via the Internet to students, teachers and parents that the school committee themselves wrote or set questions that come with the system. A few days later after the question is sent out, data is compiled.The Superintendent feels this is a good tool to see how Revere schools are doing in comparison to others in the district. “The benefit to this is that we can compare our answers to other school districts,” Dakin said. “We can see if we are doing a better job than other districts or not doing as well as we should.”Dakin plans on sending out the first sets of questions to school staff members in the next couple of weeks.The new system may also prove beneficial in helping with another problem the committee is currently facing. The committee is considering changing their school student placement plan for the middle schools. Currently, the model is that the elementary schools have a number of seats allocated to each of the middle schools and if an elementary schools exceeds its limit, a lottery will occur.The committee plans on sending a survey via the K-12 Insight to parents with all the possible models for placing students including the current one to see which one a majority of parents favor.?I still think the model we have is the best option.” Dakin said.School committee member Carol Tye would like to see a comment box added to the end of the survey. “Who knows? Someone might have an idea that we haven?t thought about,” Tye said.School committee member Dan Maguire feels strongly that the current model in place will satisfy the majority among parents. “The current one will win hands down,” Maguire said. “I feel that most parents feel that is the best option.”?We have been reacting to a small amount of voices who don?t like the current model,” Dakin said. “I think there are more people saying that the current one is the best one and we need to hear their voices as well.”Dakin advised the committee that once data from the polls are in, a difficult choice will have to be made.?When we send out these surveys, nothing will be more clear. There will be no majority,” Dakin said. “No parent is going to see one option and say ?This is it, we have found religion.?”The committee plans on making a decision before the holidays on which model to go by for the following school year. “Once we decide on what we are going to do, there will be a lot of work to follow that,” Dakin said.