By Adam Pagnucco.
MCPS’s huge boundary study, which includes roughly three-quarters of the district’s high schools and middle schools, is a high-stakes exercise. School boundary adjustments are a heavy lift for any school district and that goes triple for an economically and racially diverse jurisdiction like Montgomery County. Back in 2019-2020, the last time MCPS had a sweeping boundary exercise, a holy war erupted that played out in the school board elections. That earlier exercise went nowhere, but this year’s study is necessitated by three high school capital projects. Whether anyone likes it or not, boundaries will shift sooner rather than later.
One of the tools used by MCPS’s vendors to gather input is its Community Input Survey #1, an online survey form administered by Bloom Planning. The survey is intended to gather respondent opinions on priorities guiding boundary adjustments, including demographic characteristics, geography, stability of school assignments and facility utilization. Respondents are asked to rate the individual importance of each factor and to rank them at the end.
The opening screen of the boundary survey.
Shortly after the survey went live, I was contacted by multiple sources who informed me that they were able to complete it multiple times. One source specifically claimed that they completed the survey more than once from the same device at the same location. I was quickly able to confirm the claims.
The survey had other issues. First, it made the entry of zip code optional. Anyone who knows anything about MCPS knows that there are vast differences of opinions about the district and its individual schools tied to geography. Second, the survey explicitly allowed non-residents to participate. Other than for staff, why is this necessary?
But the biggest problem here is potential ballot box stuffing. The 2019-2020 exercise exposed ferocious disagreements between residents over the sometimes-competing priorities of proximity and diversity. A sitting planning board member just waded into that thicket in an 8,000+ person county Facebook group. If ever a county survey was at risk of being skewed by a determined minority of participants, this is the one.
Ballot box stuffing is a well-known issue in online surveys. Just google the term and you will immediately learn how to combat it in articles such as this one, this one and this one. Any competent vendor should be able to erect even primitive defenses to minimize the possibility of manipulation.
On Friday evening, I alerted MCPS about the allegations made by my sources and asked the following: “Can you tell me if Bloom Planning, the survey vendor, has a way to filter out multiple responses from the same respondent? And if they do, can they describe their process?” I asked for a response by Monday morning.
As of this writing (Monday night), I have not received a response. However, on Monday evening, MCPS representatives promoted the survey at a virtual session with the public. Did they know about my inquiry?
Unless MCPS obtains ironclad assurances from its vendor that multiple responses can be weeded out, it should be very skeptical of any results from this survey. And if ballot box stuffing is indeed occurring, accountability must be imposed in response to a waste of taxpayer money.
Update: After I published this post, MCPS sent me this response. “While the vendor hasn’t restricted survey submissions by IP address, they implemented a flag to identify multiple responses originating from the same device. Additionally, the data can be sorted by IP address to review the number of submissions from each. This allows for the identification and flagging of any suspicious patterns, such as identical responses from multiple submissions, to review and potentially remove. This setup accommodates the district’s consideration of using shared iPads at in-person meetings for survey participation.”