I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Regardless of the double negative, it looks like I won’t be satisfied.  It’s now been 3 days since there have been any new responses.  It sits at a total of 38, which is nowhere near what I was hoping for.  My dream was to get a couple hundred responses from all over the district.  I figured that would give everybody a really good feeling what other parents were experience both by school and by grade.  I guess most people just aren’t that interested.  This in itself concerns me because, if other parents are really not that interested in what’s happening in their kids’ schools or classrooms, then that’s only going to encourage the state, district, schools, and the teachers to do what they want based on ridiculous government studies, rather than doing the will of the people.  Anyway, I will digress before this becomes a political rant.

Speaking of not being satisfied, many of the respondents (18%) have decided the SWSD hasn’t been serving them in the best interest of the kids, and have chosen to home school or use a private school.  What’s interesting is that the themes of concern are basically the same between the parents with kids in the public schools, and those who have already removed their kids.  They basically boil down to communication, lack of academic achievement, and lack of discipline both by the schools and the other parents.  So I wonder, are parents who are concerned about these same things the only ones with enough motivation to fill out a survey like this?  It doesn’t look like they’re necessarily the only ones, but it does appear there is a lot of dissatisfaction.  I would argue that you’re not going to make everybody happy all the time, but a school district should be able to do better than having more than a third of all parents dissatisfied about the job they’re doing across a number of different major issues.  Because of the similarity in concerns between those dissatisfied with the school who currently have kids in the district, and those who have already removed their kids, does this mean that there are a large number of parents that are on the verge of removing their kids?

Add up the green (very dissatisfied) and red (dissatisfied) below to see the large number of unhappy parents across nearly every aspect surveyed.