The SBDM Committee received over 400 parent responses to a survey regarding their satisfaction of the school communication and culture last month. Questions included How satisfied are you with the culture prevalent at Manual? and How satisfied are you with how accessible Manual staff are to students and parents? Any questions that the parents answered as not satisfied or mostly dissatisfied were encouraged to submit anonymous comments answering why.
Trends included complaints over teacher responsiveness and how quickly they post grades to Parent Portal, the high stress on test scores and academics, and access to counselors.
“Some teachers do an excellent job communicating, but a majority do not and have an attitude as if your child is here because they were an exceptional student so they need to get it on their own,” one parent said.
“There is a huge emphasis on rules and regulations and the individual needs of kids are not taken into account,” another parent said. “There is a lot of pressure to succeed and little to no attention paid to the price that level of stress has on the students.”
A common complaint centered around the emails Manual sends out to parents—some say they receive no information from the school, while others claim they are receiving excessive amounts of notices and announcements.
“Email announcements are very sporadic and often not accurate,” a parent said. “I did not know there was an email list until my student was a junior and one of his teachers started using it.”
With these results in mind, committee members look to appease the largest issues.
“The overall thing was inconsistency,” said Mr. Todd O’Bryan (Technology) said. “Lots of parents said some [teachers] do a good job…and some don’t.”
Below are the results to the survey questions.
