Students Grades 6-12 Struggle With Engagement: Survey

FRAMINGHAM, MA- Framingham students in grades 6-12 are struggling with school engagement, more than most students across the nation, according to a district distributed survey.

For the third consecutive year, Framingham Public Schools are utilizing the Panorama Survey to track the climate and culture of students and the schools. School officials went over last year's survey results with families on Tuesday night- the 2018-2019 survey is still being completed.

The survey asks both students and parents questions that reflect on social and emotional learning and the climate of the schools in the Framingham district. Several categories were looked at including teacher-student relationships, school belonging and student engagement.

On the elementary level, which the survey categorizes from grades 3-5, only about half of student feel engaged in school, with 52 percent of students answering favorably. The percentage is lower than school officials would like to see in younger students but according to the survey it is on par with the national dataset.

Secondary student engagement was the lowest score the district received with only 23 percent of students answering favorably, putting the district behind the national dataset in the tenth percentile. While district officials said it was common across the nation to see a drop in engagement with older students, they insisted there was no excuse. "We can't just excuse it, we need to do something about it," Superintendent Tremblay said.

Student attendance is a major factor in student engagement and connection to school, Tremblay said. "How is a kid going to feel connected to school if he isn't here," he said. The district plans to move away from punitive systems and embrace systems that take the student's social and emotional health into account. The "multi-tiered system of support" is being implemented in various Framingham schools and features three tiers for varying levels of emotional need.

Within some of the district middle schools, like Dunning and Fuller, "restorative practices" are implemented as a means to discipline children through community building and repair and are an example of a "tier 1" program. Two more programs that the district hopes to roll out in the next three years to all elementary schools are "responsive classroom", which focuses on academics and developmental awareness, and "second step" which focuses on social-emotional skills and problem solving. The secondary schools, middle and high schools, will take longer to implement.

Implementing these programs takes lots of training for the teachers involved, said Judy Styer, Framingham Schools' director of health and wellness district. "This is a whole change of mindset," she said, making the implementation process that much longer.

As a whole, the district said they plan to use the past surveys as well as this years survey as a tool to guide their practices surrounding social-emotional learning in the classroom and district. "It's in all the work that we talk about, it's in our senior leader meetings," Styer said, "The issue is how do we incorporate it into the other academic work."

The 2018-19 Panorama survey was emailed to parents and students and the results should be ready by the end of May. With that data, the district will be able to identify patterns over the last three years and whether implemented practices are helping students.

See the full results of the 2017-18 Panorama Survey.

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