The survey says!

As I listened to the Orange County Board of Education discuss the proposal to merge CES and HES at their last full Board meeting, it became clear that many of the Board members had no understanding of what attracted parents to HES. And, the Superintendent's staff was providing the board with data implying that 100% of HES parents would continue to enroll their children at the combined school - regardless of its total detachment from reality.

When I spoke to Dennis Whitling and Liz Brown after the meeting, they defended the Staff's implication by saying that the only reason they had ever heard that parents prefer HES was the year-round calendar. As I told them then, and have repeated often since that night, my son is not at HES because of the year-round schedule. He is on a year-round schedule because we want him at HES. I felt that surely mine wasn't the only family to feel this way.

So, I did what any good researcher would do, I decided to collect some data based in reality.

I distributed an online survey to the parents of HES students on March 22. The survey stayed open for only 10 days and collected 201 responses. The key findings are shown below:



I have emailed a link to the survey findings directly to all HES parents for which I have an email address. Additionally, that link and a PowerPoint presentation of the survey results will be sent directly to each Board of Education member later today. Finally, I will be speaking to this issue during the Public Comment portion of the full Board meeting scheduled for Monday evening at Gravelly Hill Middle School.

If you did not receive an email with the survey findings link, you can see the results here.

I encourage every parent to join me at the meeting in Efland and sign up to speak on this subject. This is your best opportunity to be heard and it should not slip away.

The Board needs to know how widespread the impact of this decision will be. They also need to understand that no matter what they hope to accomplish by merging the two schools, those plans are destined to fail. Just like HES parents chose to enroll their children at HES, most will make other choices if the schools are merged.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete this survey and I hope to see a large crowd on Monday evening.