Most parents are giving the Northwest Catholic District School Board good marks.
Parents whose children attend the board’s schools were surveyed last month.
The board uses the findings from the community input survey to determine how parents are feeling about their children’s education and identify areas for improvement.
Seventy-three percent of respondents scored the board’s faith formation goals and the work it is doing in that area as good to fair.
Sixty-one percent of respondents felt that the work in reading and other literacy skill instruction was good to fair.
Seventy percent of respondents whose children were enrolled in French immersion programming rated the board’s work as good.
Education Director Jackie Robinson says 61% said the same about their Indigenous education programming, with 24% saying they were unsure about it.
“This lets us know (that) when we have a large percentage, a fairly large percentage reporting unsure, we may not be or we may need some work getting the message out to the work that we are doing in our schools,” says Robinson.
Two-thirds of parents also felt the board and schools were doing a good job communicating what is happening in the schools.
Various methods, such as newsletters, school messenger and social media, are used.
“With child-specific communications, the report back was lower than that of the general communications. This is another area where we know that we need to have a look at and see how we can increase in that area,” says Robinson.
Participation in the survey was lower than last year, with 119 respondents, 91% of whom were parents.
Robinson is uncertain about the reasons for a nearly 20% drop over last year.
She says other school-related surveys were taking place just prior, but it is hard to determine if parents were just surveyed-out by the time the community input survey was released.
