Complete online survey through March 20

March 9, 2023 — The Siuslaw School District (SSD) has launched a series of community outreach surveys for the school board's strategic planning initiative and the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) Integrated Guidance process and wants input from all types of people within the district.

School board strategic planning will be an ongoing process, with these surveys being an intermediate part of the process. From the data collected here, focus groups will be formed to examine district and building level data to help inform both goals and strategies for future operations. This will overlap into next school year.

The information from these surveys helps to direct grant resources and spending priorities in the following six state level programs administered by the school district:

• High School Success — These funds are targeted at the 8-12 grade level and support dropout prevention, family engagement nights, attendance monitoring software, a high school counselor as a graduation coach and for dropout prevention, portions of teaching positions in Career Technical classes, and direct fees for students that take the SAT on campus in October at Siuslaw High School (SHS).

• Student Investment Account — This is a broader grant application of student support services across all grade levels and is currently funding: an expansion of the Siuslaw West Alt School to a full day program, an art teacher at Siuslaw Middle School (SMS), a second counselor at SMS, a second counselor at Siuslaw Elementary School (SES), middle school electives teacher, additional elementary special education teacher, additional elementary homeroom teacher, district teacher-librarian, and a district nurse.

• Continuous Improvement Planning — Examination of student achievement; bringing all students to the same level of success regardless of socio-economic or demographic status.

• Career & Technical Education - Perkins V — Providing students skills for career readiness; currently Siuslaw provides programs in Auto Services, Welding/Manufacturing Tech, Culinary Arts, Health Occupations, Computer Science/Information Technology, Construction Trades and Small Business Operations.

• Everyday Matters — Efforts to increase school attendance at all grade levels.

• Early Indicator Intervention Systems — Linking data systems for teachers, counselors and administrators to create a 'dashboard' to assist in observing patterns in student performance between attendance, current course grades, discipline reports, and other local progress markers, before students have fallen too far to recover in any one term. Siuslaw currently integrates multiple information systems through Willamette ESD's Oregon Data Suite to capture these 'snapshots' of student indicators.

These surveys will help to serve as the base for the school district's Strategic Visioning Process. This process will include the identification of school board level student performance goals. The Strategic Plan will develop over this school year and the next, in several phases. These surveys help to identify some the community level priorities for the board.

Surveys are split to address four focal groups: parents & guardians, community members, students, and teachers & staff.

Surveys are open through March 20. Lane ESD staff will run a simple tally on the results so district staff can prepare initial reports for the board in April and prepare for upcoming community forum groups.

For links to the surveys and for more information go to www.siuslaw.k12.or.us/page/survey-page.