By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One explained the methodology of MCPS’s staff climate survey and Part Two summarized some stats from FY23. Today, let’s look at five questions to employees on which MCPS did well.
Q: During the past week, how often did you feel safe at work?
Note that the survey asked a similar question – “How safe do you feel in your school” – that received a 72% average positive response.
Q: How often are students given opportunities to learn about people from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?
Q: Overall, how much do you feel like you belong at your school?
Q: How supportive are staff in their interactions with each other?
Q: How respectful are the relationships between staff and students?
I am impressed by these results. With all the media coverage of crime in schools, roughly three quarters of the school staff feel safe in their workplace, and that includes large majorities of every racial group. They describe relationships between staff and students as respectful. And they feel like they belong at their schools. Think about this: do you feel like you belong at your workplace? That said, there is a caveat: averages conceal substantial variation between individual schools. We will get into that a bit later in this series.
These particular results are a credit to MCPS. It’s reasonable to wonder whether they might even spill over to students in a good way. But tomorrow we will look at some results that are much less positive for the school system.