Daily Sitka Sentinel

School Board Reviews Sitka Student Attitudes

By TOM HESSE
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Students and staff in the Sitka School District have more positive attitudes about the learning environment in local schools than they did two years ago, according to a recent district survey.

School board members and administrative staff pore over the results of a report. (Sentinel Photo)

    Sitka School Board members held a work session Monday night to dig through results from a recent report that seeks to measure student and staff attitudes about school environment. The “Climate and Connectedness” survey covers school safety, parent and teacher involvement, and other things that affect learning, said Jenni Leffing, an Alaska Association of School Boards representative who briefed the board on the results.
    “This is mapping things that affect student achievement but don’t always get paid attention to,” she said.
    The 70-question survey that students filled out asks them to choose one of five responses to a given statement. For example, students can respond to a statement that reads, “My teachers are fair,” by checking “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “agree some/disagree some,” “agree” or “strongly agree.” More than 500 kids ranging from grades six through 12 filled out  the survey.
    Sitka generally scored well in student responses across the eight categories. School safety ranked highest, with 65 percent of students agreeing or strongly agreeing with statements that the school was a safe place. The lowest rating was in peer climate, which measures students’ perceptions about how respectful and helpful their peers are. Only 19 percent of students said students generally treated each other well, which Lefing said was not uncommon.
    “Peer climate is usually the lowest rated scale, but the peer climate has gone up significantly in your district since 2012,” Lefing said.
    In 2012 only 13 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with statements that the peer climate in Sitka was positive. The survey results are broken down into one of three categories based on the five available responses: “disagree/strongly” and “disagree” was one category; “agree/strongly” and “agree” was the category on the other end of the scale, and the middle group was “agree some/disagree some.” That middle answer was the one chosen by the large majority of Sitka students taking the survey.
    In six of the eight categories surveyed, at least 49 percent of students chose “agree some/disagree some.” Phil Burdick, co-principal of Pacific High School, said during the work session that the middle group stood out to him.
    “There is just this sort of big group of people ... that are just sort of ‘meh’,” Burdick said. “Why are they so ‘meh’? This isn’t a ‘meh’ district.”
    Lefing said some districts had requested that AASB go back to a 4-point response scale in order to encourage students to be more decisive in their responses. But she said AASB was sticking with the 5-point scale because it would allow for consistency across multiple years. In their discussion board members suggested that the middle group of students is a key area to watch in the schools’ efforts to improve general school quality. Burdick said the district should build a culture in which students strive for more than the middle of the road.
    “I would like us to maybe think about striving for a little more,” he said. “I could walk across that stage (for graduation) with an ‘agree some/disagree some’ attitude, but I want kids to  walk across that stage who are on fire and have a passion for what’s next.”
    A new component to the survey examines student perceptions about alcohol use among the student body. The new section was added as a part of another statewide initiative aimed at better understanding and curbing teen drinking. The data measured what students believed was happening with alcohol use, with the results to be compared with other data on actual reported use. Well over half the students in the district – 59 percent – thought that “most other students” binge drink, and 69 percent of students thought most other students have used alcohol at least once.
    Some board members wondered if the student opinions indicating high alcohol use were caused by gossip in the district, and Lefing reminded the board that this part of the survey was measuring perception, not reality.
    “This is not saying this is actually happening,” she said.
    Also, students may have found some questions somewhat challenging to comprehend. For example, the question about binge drinking reads:
    “During the past 30 days, on how many days do you think most students in your school had 5 or more drinks of alcohol in a row, that is, within a couple of hours?”
    According to the report, 82 percent of students at Sitka High “thought that most other students drank 5 or more drinks in a row in the last 30 days.”
    Lefing went over the results with a group of school administrators and a group of students in addition to the school board.
    Sitka High Principal Karen Macklin said a good cross-section of students at SHS turned out to discuss the results and their reactions to them. She specifically noted the group’s reaction to the school safety results, which said 6 percent of students in the district didn’t view school as a safe place.
    “They were just shocked that people didn’t feel safe,“ Macklin said.
    That 6 percent is down from 10 percent in 2012, and the majority, 65 percent, agreed or strongly agreed that Sitka schools were safe.
    School Board President Lon Garrison said the next course of action may be to meet with students and get their input on how to continue improving the school climate. The board similarly reached out after the 2012 survey.
    The complete results are available online at sitkaschools.org by clicking on the “About Us” button under the District tab.