By Paige Lambert
Hays CISD presented results from its inaugural student engagement survey at the May 18 school board meeting.
The survey was presented along with the annual employee satisfaction and family and community surveys conducted by K12 Insight, which conducts surveys for public schools and communities across the country.
The student engagement survey was administered online for grades 6-12. Participation was 30 percent of the students, which Shelby McIntosh, vice president of research at K12 Insight, said is typical for the first go-around.
“This is really designed to allow students to give feedback on their schools,” she said. “For it being the first year and having students taking it outside of the classroom, this was a good number.”
Overall grades 6-8 had the highest score on a 4.0 scale, ranking 2.93 while grades 9-10 and 11-12 ranked 2.66 and 2.65, respectively. The numbers put students between “sometimes” and “often” engaged.
“It’s not out of the ordinary to see scores lower as the students get older,” McIntosh said. “But obviously we don’t want that gap to get too wide.”
The survey was divided by cognitive engagement and social and emotional engagement. Cognitive questions focused on academic support, relevance, student experience and class experience.
The social and emotional scores, which focus on social awareness and self-awareness, were slightly higher than the cognitive scores.
“If you look at scores for kids in special education or eligible for 504 services, they are also higher in cognitive engagement,” McIntosh said. “It’s an assumption, but I think it’s interesting how those are kids who, in many cases, are receiving more one-on-one attention.”
Students could also partake in a Let’s Talk! Dialogue, which focused on addressing school climate issues.
Out of the 99 comments, most were typical of students, such as dress code and opportunities to explore other extra curricular activities, McIntosh said.
“There were some comments about understanding and respecting cultural differences,” McIntosh said.
Typically, the data is divided to reflect each school. Trustee Merideth Keller said it would be hard to do so since the comments could be submitted anonymously.
“If the comment section is not easily affiliated with the survey portion, there seems to be a disconnect,” Keller said. “I want to be able to do something with the information people give us.”
For student engagement, K12 Insight recommended investigating how to get more students involved in more extracurricular activities and creating a separate school climate study for students, parents and school based staff.
McIntosh said conducting the survey next year would provide more information on how the schools have changed and how they compare to other districts in the area. Administering the test during the school day would also increase participation, she said.
Each campus will receive a report of the data specific to that school. The employment satisfaction and family and community surveys will be included.
Christina Courson, Hays CISD communication specialist, said students will also be able to access their results via their self-serve link to the original survey.
K12 Insight will later send a communication piece highlighting the survey findings and the decisions made based on those findings, McIntosh said.
