FUHSD recently sent out a survey to determine the wellness and satisfaction of its students. According to the survey website the purpose is to “Identify school and life factors that impact student wellness, develop strategies to promote healthy school-life balance and improve overall student wellness and implement and evaluate strategies by working with all stakeholders.”

The survey is being conducted and interpreted by Hanover Research, “an independent market research firm based in Washington, D.C.” that was contracted by FUHSD to work with the Wellness Taskforce to develop and analyze the survey said John Dwyer.

The Wellness Taskforce was created to investigate the complaints and comments that FUHSD has received from parents, students and teachers in a broader, district-wide sense rather than school specific, for which similar surveys have been done before said John Dwyer.

“What prompted the survey was the work of the committee and what prompted the committee was the original petition for the late start and sitting down with everybody, we realized that late start is just one facet of it.” Principal Greg Giglio said.

The survey contains  questions relating to school start times, homework load and emotional well-being. These questions were to give a broader insight into FUHSD student’s ideas on these issues, as they have been in site-specific, but not district-wide surveys before said John Dwyer.

“What we are looking at is to try to get a real sense of what the student experience is in all of our schools. Now the theory is that there will a be a lot of differences between age groups or genders or ethnicities and different schools and so forth. But, we want to get a sense of how students feel in certain main areas.” Wellness taskforce facilitator John Dwyer said.

Dwyer said that in order for change relating to the surveyed issues to happen based on the results of the survey, priority issues must be identified and a list of recommendations must be made. These preliminary actions must  then be approved by the board of trustees for   the schools to take action.

The results of the survey will be released to the by Hanover Research by Thanksgiving to the Wellness Taskforce, which is then processed and released to students, parents and teachers in January said John Dwyer.

Dwyer said the amount of responses is useable, but they hope for more in the last few weeks of the survey.

“I would love to have as many people to participate and feel that they had the chance to have their voice heard as possible,” Dwyer said in a message to students.

At last check, Giglio said over 200 members of the community had responded to the survey.