Trey Oehmler, Reporter
@TCourant
Last summer, a group of administrators and faculty met with representatives from the Center for School Climate and Learning (CSCL) to discuss improving the school’s climate and culture.
There’s a long process involved with improving a school’s climate. The Center first creates a survey to assess school culture. “They have developed a survey that they use with schools but they tailor it to what the students in the school tell them they see some as some of the significant issues,” assistant principal Larry Sullivan, said.
The next step for was create a group representative of the student body to work with the CSCL. “We started out with the school counselors,” Mr. Sullivan said, “They helped suggest a number students, and kids could also nominate themselves through advisory, so we actually ended up with over 100 students whose names came forward either on their own or through an adult nominating them.”
After consolidating the list to about 25 students, the group met with representatives from the CSCL and administrators to get an understanding of the initiative. “Our intention is to improve school culture, and this is designed to be at least a two year process,” Mr. Sullivan said. “This year is going to be a lot of collecting information. We’re starting to come to common ground on what we think some of the issues we should tackle are. This student group will be the one to administer the survey and look at the data to decide what our priorities should be.”
Improving school climate and culture is something the school has been working on over the last several years. “We did a survey two years ago, as part of our New England Association Study,” Acting Principal Veronica LeDuc said. “This is something that schools do periodically, because the students change. It’s important for schools to keep trying to establish whether the climate is a positive one for their students.”
The school hopes to emphasize the students’ role in the process. “Students are important to the initiative because no matter how much adults may want to change something or tweak something in school culture, it has to be the students who want it,” Mr. Sullivan said.
One of the students taking part in the initiative is junior Chip Mahoney. “One group or set of students can’t make school wide decisions because it wouldn’t be fair,” he said, “ We need to have equal representation. I think that the students in the group now represent at least 3/4 if not more of the school’s class, social and academic structure.”
The group will continue to meet every Friday with the CSCL for the rest of the year to discuss the issues over school climate and culture.
