Strategic Plan Survey Available Again

I checked the I-SS web site and noticed that the Strategic Plan Survey is live once again. As I did in a previous post, I am recommending that everyone take the time to complete the survey. We are being asked for our feedback on the goals that will determine the direction of the School System for the next year. You may not feel that surveys are important but the survey was mentioned at last week's Committee of the Whole meeting and at this week's Board Meeting. The administration needs to hear from students, parents, teachers, and others. Otherwise it will continue to be business as usual. The administration likes to cite data so let's give them some real data that reflects the wishes of everyone interested in the quality of our schools. Click on the link below to access the survey.

Click Here

Strategic Plan Survey Not Available

I hope that everyone who was planning to complete the Strategic Plan Survey had an opportunity to do so. I checked this afternoon and, although the link to the survey is still available on the I-SS web Home page, the survey itself is not. If you now click on the link to the survey you are now taken to a page that displays the following message.

Sorry, but the survey 'EOY Review SMART Goals' is not currently live, so you cannot take it at this time.

Perhaps someone at I-SS was checking this blog, saw the post about the survey, and decided that the survey should be corrected. Anyone looking at the survey should be able to tell that it was seriously flawed. The statements were cryptic and lacking essential information. I do not know who designed this survey but that person is in serious need of professional training. Maybe it is time for a PDSA.

Of course, it could be that the administration did not like the responses and decided to remove the survey before they received any more negative responses. Remember it is important that the data represents what we want it to represent.

Strategic Plan Survey

I just noticed, today, that among the several items listed under the Announcements heading on the I-SS web site Home page is a link to the Strategic Plan Survey. There is no real information given regarding the survey on the home page. It just has Strategic Plan Survey and under that it has Click Here to give us feedback on our Strategic Goals. There is no information on who is expected to take this survey or what I-SS plans to do with the results of the survey.

If you click on the link and go to the survey you will see that there is not much information there either. At the top of the page is the heading: EOY Review SMART Goals. Now I assumed that EOY meant End Of Year but I did not know what the acronym SMART stood for so I clicked on the ‘Quality in ISS’ link that is also on the I-SS Home web page and from there went to ‘Resources’ to find the link to the I-SS acronym list. Using the acronym list I verified that EOY did indeed represent End Of Year and I learned that SMART stood for Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Relevant, and Time-framed. I am glad that it was listed because I would never have figured that one out.

The instructions indicate that you should review each of the listed ‘suggested strategic indicators’ and indicate whether you agree or disagree with each one. Plus it states that you can leave suggestions for ‘improved measures, clarity, etc.’ I think the word clarity should have been in bold since, as I mentioned, there is not much clarity in the purpose of the survey. In addition, some of the Objectives/Goals listed are lacking in specificity. For example, Objective 2.1 gives some correlation values but does not explain what those values indicate. What percent of all I-SS stakeholders have had a statistics class? Speaking of percents, Objective 4.1 has blank spaces where the percent values are supposed to be given. I guess that once I-SS gets the responses to that one the administration will fill in the percents so the ‘data’ looks good.

At least we are being asked for our input. That is, I guess we are. Therefore, I recommend that everyone reading this post take the survey. There are only 12 objectives to rate. I also recommend that you write some ‘questions, comments or suggestions’ in the corresponding comment box. You can click on the link below, or above, to access the survey.

Click Here