By Staff
March 20th, 2017
BURLINGTON, ON
IPSOS Reid will not complete the analysis and formatting of the data on parent views related to the possible closing of two high schools in the southern part of the city. The data was collected during the first half of March.
They will deliver the data to the Halton District School Board on Wednesday in advance of the last PARC meeting on Thursday.
On Tuesday they will give a top line overview and discuss some of the major results from the survey.
There were 1611 responses to the survey which was apparently sent to every parent or guardian the school board had an email address for – seems like a very low response for such a contentious issue.
Truly pathetic and shameful.
The survey itself was bad enough (Lynn is quite right: a 12-year old could have done it better on Survey Monkey and produced a more comprehensible product). Not having the data ready for widespread dissemination and review in advance of the final meeting is disgraceful. It leads to the perception that the decision around school closures has already been made, and everything surrounding it is merely “window dressing”.
Again, where is Eleanor McMahon? Why is she not stepping forward and challenging both the transparency and authenticity of this consultation process? Not much of a public representative. Time next election to toss her out followed by these feckless school trustees.
@Hans
While some heads should roll for this debacle, let us not forget that pay raises all around are a must in order to get and retain the “Best talent,” for these exceedingly demanding positions.
I gotta believe that some people are putting in waaay more than 40 hours a week on this. The upside is they are probably all parents and unpaid for any of this.
In an ideal world, there should be a strong relationship between compensation and the quality of talent that it attracts, but it simply is not true and never was. It is a myth, perpetuated by those who stand to gain from it.
More time spent by board staff resulting in poor quality decisions is not something that should be rewarded with pay raises or bonuses. In addition, there are no penalties for poor judgment or failures, and we are seeing plenty of those.
My sympathies are with the parents, who are being required to play what mathematicians call a Zero Sum Game (what is won by one group is lost by another) in a futile effort to improve the decisions, which had probably been made when the first school closure proposals were made public. As you point out, they are working for free, to do what is best for their children and I would consider it an upside only if there were a potential for improving the results.
We could have done it on Survey Monkey and got the results ourselves. How long does it take? And it is ridiculous that they are going to present some sort of overview and “major results” without showing the actual data! Here we go again with the Board presenting tainted, biased information. The survey is utterly and completely useless and should not be taken seriously by anyone. Again, Kirk Perris from Ipsos stood up and said that anyone in the world could do the survey and one could pay someone in India to do it hundreds of times, and said about three times that it is “not scientific”. So WHY DO IT?
We know that if it shows them the results they want, or they can taint it by saying the results aren’t ready but here, we made up our own summary with comments we do want, they will stand there and present it and use it. And we know certain PARC members will say how great that is. If they don’t show the results they want, they will say it is non-scientific and that too many people from one school did it so it isn’t reliable. And those same couple of PARC members will say how it’s no good.
This sad farce should have been stopped a long time ago.
The school board’s apparent incompetence is stupendous. They have lost the Public’s confidence; it’s time for some demotions and resignations.
Call Kirk Perris at Ipsos, 416.572.4488, and ask if any of the parents or guardians were contacted by email about the survey. At the March 7 public meeting, Kirk told me that no emails were sent to parents or guardians because staff at the HDSB were unable to set up a separate link for parents and guardians. I spoke with Mr. Renzella, Planning Manager HDSB, at the meeting and he confirmed that no emails were sent out. Mr. Renzella did not think that this was of significance even though the commitment to reach out to parents and guardians was made at the last PARC meeting on February 16.