Framingham Schools Want To Know How You Get Your News

The Framingham Public School district wants to know how you learn about school news.

In an effort to improve communication to parents (and staff), the public school district published a survey Monday night. Parents received an email about the survey.

“In our continuing efforts to improve the Framingham Public Schools, we are focusing on school to community communications. We want to know what information is most important to you, what tools are best for sharing this information with you, and what we can do to improve our systems for communicating with you,” stated the email.

The district has been survey happy lately in an effort to improve communication with parents, staff, and the community in general.

This is the third survey released by the school district in the last two weeks.

The district has decided communication is not its strong point.

The Superintendent, who received an otherwise exemplary review from the elected Framingham School Committee in 2014, was told he needs to improve communication to staff, parents, and the community in June 2014.

In January, Superintendent Stacy Scott hired Justin Martin, as the district’s new communications director, at a salary of $60,000 a year, for 20 hours a week of work.

Also in January, the Framingham School Committee formed a task force to improve communications.

The task force, which has 13 parents and community members appointed to it, is led by School Committee member Jim Stockless. Scott and Martin also are part of the task force. The task force has only held one meeting thus far. Stockless said last week, the group would meet again, after the survey results were available.

Parents were already unhappy with the latest survey, unveiled last night.

Several complained about the inability to select multiple schools in the survey, especially if they were using the Safari browser. Many parents in the district have children in more than one school.

There are 8,000 students in the public school district. About 40% of the school district, English is not the student’s first language. Framingham Schools require that communications be issued in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, when distributed to parents. The district does not always follow its own policy, however, when releasing memos, emails, surveys, and other communications.

The latest communications survey was only released in English. The last survey on how to make up snow days was issued in all three languages.

One question asked those taking the survey to list what zip code they lived in giving the options of 01701, 01702, 01703, 01704 or 01705. The zip codes of 01703, 01704 and 01705 have no physical street address, they are post office boxes only, one parent noted.

Other parents complained on a Facebook page called Open & Honest Discussion About Framingham Schools, about awkward wording, confusing statements, and typos in the survey.

To take the communication survey: www.surveymonkey.com/s/FPScommunicationssurvey

No deadline was given on when the survey must be completed by.