Knowing Their Minds

Technology helps us track public opinion

By Gene Huddle and Ginny Tresvant

Gene Huddle is a consultant for strategic planning in the Snohomish, Wash., public schools, and Ginny Tresvant is superintendent of the district.

Like other school districts, ours knows how important community involvement is to running a successful school system. Without community involvement and support, it's difficult to bring about change and difficult to move forward with those things school leaders truly believe are in the best interest of students.

We've learned that from experience here in the Snohomish, Wash., schools. We're a fast-growing suburban Seattle school district, with a student population of about 8,000 in a 16,000-resident community. Though we succeeded with our latest levy, the victory was preceded by our losing bond elections two times in a row. That experience taught us the future offers no guarantees; problems raising money to pay for new school construction, technology, and school operations are always a possibility.

Still, we believe an important step school districts can take to encourage support for such needs is involving the community in planning. In fact, in our school-improvement efforts, we're striving to meet challenges set down by the National Center on Education and the Economy: Those challenges include strengthening families' contributions to students' educations and providing programs that actively engage parents in support of their kids' achieving high standards. To help us in those endeavors, we've found two services that other school districts might like to know about. These are tools that help us track community response to various issues affecting the district--tools that help guide our strategies.

Before telling you about them, though, let us first say that "plugging" into community opinion is hard. We had tried to do it by involving a large number of community people in our strategic planning process. (For example, we have as many parents and community members as staff members serving on local school planning teams and on districtwide planning committees.) But we felt we weren't reaching as many people as we'd like or getting as much information from our community as we needed. What we needed--and what we went searching for--was a way to turn community perceptions into useful information quickly and at a low cost.

Why not just survey the community on the questions to which we needed answers? We tried that, only to find that the traditional survey approach didn't work well for us. We hired consultants to conduct annual surveys; we recruited community members to be telephone interviewers for our district; and we developed our own surveys, too, mailing them to every student, staff member, parent, and community member. But these methods all proved expensive, and the data, which took a long time to accumulate, were always of marginal value because return rates were so low.

That's when we found the two tools we alluded to earlier. A member of our community told district officials about a company in our area--Results-Based Systems Corporation--that provides technological support for the kinds of challenges we were facing. The company offers some new services--perhaps available from other vendors as well--that helped us get the information we needed from our community. We can't predict anyone's experiences with any company or service, but here's how the technology helped us.

Instant feedback

The first tool, the Electronic Group Interaction System (EGIS), is a portable, computerized system intended to help groups work together efficiently and economically. Using handheld keypads, meeting participants respond to ideas and information presented during a meeting. The system immediately "collects" those responses and, after all the responses are in, turns them into graphs and charts that the group can see on a video monitor at the front of the room. Seeing how other people and the group as a whole respond to the information under discussion--whether it's the naming of a new school, a change in curriculum content, or a school-renovation plan--helps stimulate discussion. Plus, the charts and graphs can be stored for future use.

One way we use EGIS is to collect information. Our district recently conducted a survey--containing 110 questions--of 100 parents, community members, staff members, and students gathered in a room. Instantly, everyone in the room was able to see the group responses on a chart projected in the front of the room. Conducting the entire survey and seeing the results took us 50 minutes. And by the next morning, we had printouts of charts showing how the group responded to each of the questions, as well as a computer disk with a file for us to use with our district's statistical software.

The way we see it, EGIS offers several advantages: First, we get more focused meetings; the instant feedback EGIS provides allows a group to take, for example, a controversial proposal and modify it based on any objections or concerns brought to light. Also, because participants register their responses anonymously, they are included equally--without regard to verbal skills. The opinions of people who tend to control conversation do not dominate, and less-vocal people are not ignored. Yet another plus: Meeting leaders can use the feedback to correct misunderstandings on the spot.

We find that what EGIS offers us makes up for the price of the service. In our experience, EGIS costs us about $3,000 per use. What that means is, for $3,000, we can seek feedback from as many groups of between 100 and 200 people as we want during a 24-hour period.

Voting with their voices

As powerful as EGIS is, we also discovered another powerful technology--offered by the same company--called the Voice Poll Network. This one allows us continually to monitor the "pulse" of the community.

The Voice Poll Network is a telephone-based service through which parents and community members express opinions on any subject a school or district wishes. Here's how it works: Someone at the district level prepares survey questions and reads them aloud into the telephone system. Parents and community members call a special telephone number to respond to the recorded questionnaire, or the system initiates the interaction by calling a predetermined set of telephone numbers. The system asks each survey question, and the respondent registers his or her opinion by pressing a number on the telephone keypad. Later, charts and graphs are prepared that show distribution of opinion around an issue. We've used this system to get community feedback on topics such as school-community relationships, district and school leadership, and use of technology in teaching.

The Voice Poll Network offers us several advantages: For one thing, it reduces the cost of collecting information and makes that information collection easier. (Think of the complexity and cost involved in hiring survey researchers or training staff members to conduct surveys.) In addition, parents and community members have a continuing means of communication with the school or district, and they rightly feel they have a voice in decision making. Furthermore, the district has a means of determining public opinion on an ongoing basis.

We now use Voice Poll Network services in our district office and hope to use the service at each school. We found the service to be well within the budget of a district our size. The Voice Poll Network costs us about $3,800 over six months. For that amount, we can have the service automatically call 200 people or take calls from about 3,600 people who want to weigh in on one or more issues.

Using these two technologies is still new to us, but we can already see their potential. Not only will our school administrators use the information to make more-informed decisions, but our community will be more knowledgeable about and involved in our school district. And it is our hope that both those situations will translate into stronger Snohomish schools.