According to the school district administration, 91 percent of parents districtwide who participated in a survey this past fall were satisfied with the quality of an SMMUSD education for their children, and 97 percent felt welcome at their child’s school.
These results varied between individual school sites, with Malibu High School (MHS) parents especially tough when scoring their satisfaction with the district — 34 percent of parents said they were “very satisfied” with the quality of their child’s education, while 46 percent said they were “satisfied.” Eight percent of responding parents were “very dissatisfied’ with the quality of education at MHS.
These figures came out after Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) earlier this month released results from a districtwide parent engagement survey designed to help guide the district improve education by targeting areas where the schools can become more “family-friendly.”
“The findings will create a framework around which the district will develop a parent engagement plan that will inform the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP),” the district said in a statement.
“We want all our schools to be family-friendly — places where parents feel they have a voice and they are being heard,” Superintendent Sandra Lyon was quoted as saying. “Turning our parent feedback into an action plan as part of our LCAP parent engagement goal, is extremely important.”
The results of the surveys, which in total polled more than 1,900 parents from Santa Monica and Malibu, are now in the process of being analyzed by both experts and small groups made up of parents, teachers and students.
“The results will be reviewed with an eye of what are we doing well, what are we doing not so well, what could we be doing better and what are we not doing at all and need to add,” school spokesperson Gail Pinsker said.
That review will be presented as part of the LCAP update, tentatively scheduled for the June 29 SMMUSD Board of Education meeting, Pinsker explained.
One of the state priorities of the LCAP is making sure parents are involved in their children’s education. Parents should have input in decision making and should actively participate in educational programs, the LCAP states.
The groups that come together to review the data will decide the relevance of percentage differences between satisfaction at various school sites. For instance, parents at MHS were consistently more critical than their Santa Monica counterparts, though the difference was often only a number of percentage points. It is up to the district to determine whether or not this discrepancy is significant.
Santa Monica High School (Samohi) parents who responded gave an overall 90 percent satisfaction rate to their child’s education, to MHS’ 80 percent.
In response to the statement “I feel welcome at the school,” 71 percent of Samohi parents said that was an “accurate” statement, while another 23 percent said that was “sometimes accurate.”
That can be compared to 69 percent of MHS parents who feel the statement “I feel welcome at the school” is accurate, or 25 percent who feel it is “sometimes accurate.”
It’s possible this boils down to a personnel issue. A total of 68 percent of Samohi parents said office members are friendly and courteous, to MHS’ 46 percent.
