Olympia school survey shows student’s problems with lack of support

A recent survey by the Olympia School District (OSD) shows that students have a falling opinion of several aspects of school life.

Interim Chief Academic Officer and staff of Teaching and Learning Inger Owen presented the results of its Panorama survey during the OSD meeting on November 10, which showed a decrease in students’ optimism about their school life

According to OSD’s website, Panorama is a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) assessment tool with research backing, which helps evaluate the state of students, families, staff, and community members.

“When we originally designed the questions, we did longitudinally over time, so we can track progress,” Owen said, “We really worked together to design continuity between the student survey question banks, varied family question banks, as well as the staff and teacher question banks.”

Falling stats

With 1719 current respondents from last term’s 1661 in grades 3-5, and 4294 current respondents from 2815 in grades 6-12, the results revealed aspects that students think were not given much importance during the term.

There were no topics that showed an increase—all topics for this result show a decrease or the same percentage compared to the spring term results.

The most drastic drops in descending order were in academic needs, cultural awareness & action, and self-efficacy.

For the student’s academic needs, it dropped 10 points from 78% to 68% in grades 3-5, and 8 points from 80% to 72% in grades 6-12, Sample questions for this topic include “Are you getting all the help you need in your schoolwork right now?”.

The cultural awareness and action topic also had a considerable drop of 6 points from 42% to 36% in grades 6 to 12. This topic was described as how often students learn about, discuss, and confront issues of race, ethnicity, and culture.

The third topic to witness a change was self-efficacy, described as how much students believe they can succeed in achieving academic outcomes. It dropped 1 point for grades 3-5 (58% to 57%) and 5 points (51% to 46%) for grades 6-12.

Self-efficacy, described as how much students believe they can succeed in achieving academic outcomes, dropped 1 point for grades 1-3 (58% to 57%) and 5 points (51% to 46%) for grades 6-12.

The results of the fall survey with its corresponding graphs and descriptions may be viewed on the OSD’s website.

The survey is administered during each school year's fall and spring semesters to assess the well-being of the people connected to supporting the Whole Child concept.