Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Pollsters: From left, Jaime Watts, Stephanie Tornincasa, and Arwen Lange, along with other members of Willow Glen High School Leadership Group, put together a student survey that was conducted this semester at the high school.




District to adopt survey designed by students at Willow Glen High

Goal is to get more students involved in school activities

By Kate Carter

San Jose Unified School District officials say they're so impressed with a survey designed by students at Willow Glen High School that they plan to introduce it in the district's other middle and high schools.

The high school's leadership class spent the past few months working on a student survey they designed to find out how to get more Willow Glen high students involved in school activities.

"We always see the same people doing activities," leadership class student and junior class secretary Arwen Lange says. She says she wants to know, "How do we make it different people and more people, and make it fun for them?"

Students in the leadership class, mainly made up of student government officers, presented their proposed survey at the district's March 12 interdistrict leadership council meeting. The council includes student leaders from all the district's high schools. Some district staff and a school board member also attend the meetings.

The survey will ask students to respond to questions about their involvement in such activities as sports, dances and clubs; their familiarity with the student government; and whether or not they chose to attend Willow Glen High. Students at last week's meeting proposed expanding the survey to ask more questions about the specific activities in which students participate, how safe they feel in school and what other classes they would like to take.

The survey is voluntary. Survey participants will be anonymous but they will be asked to identify their ethnicity, gender, grade level and educational goals.

Steve Berta, manager of student services for the district, says he also wants to get feedback. He says he wants to find out how successful the district's activities staff is at involving students in leadership and activities at all the district's secondary schools. When he heard about Willow Glen's survey from Activities Vice Principal Chuck Hernandez, he thought that, with modifications, it could be used throughout the district. That's what should happen, "if all goes according to plan," he says.

"We'd been talking about how to find out about participation in our activities," Berta says. "It folded right into what we wanted to do for the whole district."

Students in the leadership class are working this year to involve more students in school activities, teacher Melissa McCoy says. Suggestions from Hernandez and other public leaders led the students to consider how to ask their classmates what they wanted out of their high school.

"They're trying to make up for what we don't have, what we're missing," she says. "They feel like they're doing something very important, and they are. I hope this is the beginning of something very positive in our school system. There's no other school that has a class like this."

McCoy and Lange both say one of the problems at Willow Glen High is that the student leadership doesn't reflect the ethnic makeup of the school. There are some Latino students in student government, they say, but not as many as one would hope or expect at a school with a 54 percent Latino student population.

They also say that the leadership class students struggled with how to get usable information from the survey, but not make students feel that they were being labeled and prejudged. Lange says it's important that her classmates understand that they are making this effort to help make school fun for everyone.

"We want to present the data to the students so they know that we're going to use it somehow," Lange says. "We want it to be taken seriously. It's not just another district survey. We want to tell them, 'We're students just like you and we want to know what you're thinking.'"

The Willow Glen students have already received approval from the school administration to conduct the survey in classes from March 26 through March 29. Marcy Lauk, a consultant who works for the district, will then take the completed surveys and compile the results, a task that the student government is paying her to do.

Once the results are in, leadership class students plan to have more in-depth interviews with specific students, to try to get more complete responses to the questions.

Lange says they also want to show the student body their results at an assembly.

She acknowledges that the work they are doing now probably won't change things at Willow Glen High right away. She is hopeful about what it poses for the future of Willow Glen, though.

"I'm really excited to be a part of something like this," Lange says. "I don't believe it sometimes. People are acknowledging our work. It can't happen overnight, but I really think we can start something."

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