North Syracuse — The North Syracuse Central School District is looking for help from the community to improve the way it serves its students.
The district has developed a survey that was sent to families of students and posted on the district website on Jan. 11. The survey, according to Superintendent Annette Speach, seeks feedback from community members on the district’s performance.
“The survey is meant to gather input from parents and the community on how we’re doing in various areas,” Speach said. “We’re looking at school climate, safety and instruction. There are different areas to give feedback on how people think we’re doing.”
Speach said the survey should take about 10 minutes, less if you don’t have children in the district.
“It breaks down by school,” she said. “If you have more than one [child], you can feel free to take more time and provide more information.”
This is the first time the NSCSD has conducted a survey of this breadth.
“We’ve never done anything of this nature before,” Speach said. “We’ve done online exit polls after the budget votes. They weren’t nearly as thorough. People are busy. They would come out and vote, but they just didn’t have the time to do the exit polls. This is much more thorough. This is the first time we’ve launched something like this.”
Speach said the district will use the information gathered from the survey to try to improve its performance.
“We’re going to use the data and the feedback to measure how we’re going as a district in terms of meeting our goals and working towards our mission of educating students,” she said. “It’s important because if we don’t know how we’re performing, we can’t make changes and improve. We need to do this to measure what we’re all about.”
Speach said the district is considering conducting the survey on an annual basis.
The results of the survey will be shared with the board of education during the second meeting in March. They’ll be shared with the public some time thereafter.
The survey, which is available at nscsd.org, can be accessed until Feb. 29.