The Gateway district constantly seeks input from a variety of individuals, groups, and organizations in order to gather suggestions, identify trends, and make improvements on how to better meet the needs of our various constituencies. Methods include formal state reviews of programs such as last year’s Coordinated Program Review, the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS) operations review, and the input of individuals and groups we meet with in the community and schools (at town halls, the local store and the recent Gateway 2025 meetings). We are always gathering information, which has been important in planning and decision making, resulting in a number of changes that have been primarily driven by input from students, staff, parents, community members and professionals outside of the district.
To be fair, I’m sure that it sometimes appears that folks are being asked to provide information about the schools on a near constant basis. However, we think it’s essential that we collect as many ideas and observations from not only our own staff, but from parents, students, community members, and state organizations to help ensure that we’re not missing important and timely information as we move forward with district changes and improvements.
We do have a number of upcoming items planned and I’m hoping that everyone will bear with us and participate in meetings, complete surveys, and continue to provide feedback on a regular basis with us so that we can have a representative cross section on our communities represented in the data that we’ll be using to make future plans and decisions. I anticipate that we’ll have two additional Gateway 2025 meetings sometime this spring/early summer, additional meetings with town officials, as well as annual town meetings, and we have a number of surveys planned over the few months.
These surveys include gathering information from our teachers, students, and parents regarding the use of Blizzard Bags this year; a survey of staff regarding technology use in the classroom; a mandated Title I survey of Chester staff, students, and parents; a communications survey from an outside consultant for the community, staff, and parents; as well as our ongoing exit interview survey for parents who elected to school choice their children out of Gateway. Each of these surveys is relatively short and shouldn’t take too long to complete but will give us needed information for decisions around the use of Blizzard Bags, practices used in elementary Title I programming, ideas about how to meet staff needs in technology, how to better communicate with our constituents, and where we may be falling short in providing student opportunities. We’ll be communicating how and when each of these surveys may be accessed and how the data will be collected, used, and shared.
Our goal is to be as responsive to our constituents (students, parents, staff, and other members of the greater community) as we can under whatever constraints we have (fiscal, regulatory, staffing, time) in order to better serve everyone. Please help us gather this information by participating in meetings, communicating with staff, and completing these surveys. Your involvement is essential in moving the district forward in a direction that we can all support.
