Overview

From the inception of the Facilities Master Plan process, the Project Team worked to fulfill the mandate of the School District’s explicit charge to obtain as much input from the community as possible. Much of this input was gathered at the public workshops and other meetings, but the project team also obtained substantial information from its surveys.

During the first four months of the planning process, the Project Team administered three separate surveys. Each focused on a stakeholder segment. First, we surveyed the district teachers and staff, then middle school and high school students, and lastly the wider community, including those who work as well as live in the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District.

All of these surveys were quantitative in nature, and were designed as a "census" of different groups within the District.  Efforts were made to publicize the survey to group members eligible to take them, so that everyone  would have an opportunity to participate.  While the results are not statistically projectable in the same way that a survey of randomly selected individuals would be, the Project Team believes that it obtained a significant number of representative respondents for each of these surveys.  Thus, the results suggest clear trends in district-wide opinions about the facilities and about participant expectations.


Fielding and Posting of Surveys

All three surveys were posted on a website created specifically for this purpose. Each survey was posted for a period of time and the results were tabulated by a “back end” system that allowed the Project Team to gather the statistics in a spreadsheet. One of the three surveys, the community survey, was presented in bi-lingual format, both English and Spanish. Also, the community survey was available in paper format, so that community members who did not have access to a computer could obtain a paper version. These paper versions were entered by FMP staff members into the electronic version so that they could be tallied in the same manner as the electronic surveys. The reason that the first two surveys were not bi-lingual and also available in paper format is that it was assumed, because English is the official language of the district and because all classroom instruction is in English, that each teacher, administrator, staff member, and student would have computer access and could read and write in English.

The design for each survey was guided by the seven Strategic Initiatives of the Educational plan. Each survey was reviewed multiple times by the Project Manager and the members of the Ad Hoc Facilities Committee in order to address as many topics as possible within the length constraints of the survey. Summaries of each survey were presented to the District Board and also at the community workshops.

The graph based summaries of these surveys are also available by the links on the navigation bar of this website that may be accessed on the left-hand side of the page.