The Client
The Woodland School District serves over 7,000 children in grades K-8 and is located in northern Lake County, Illinois in the towns of Gurnee and Gages Lake.

The district was founded 50 years ago when several small independent school districts joined together to form a new school district—Woodland Community Consolidated District #50.

At that time, there were just over 300 students. Woodland School District 50 provides a wide range of services and programs to help a child be successful in school, including advanced placement programs, English as a second language, special education and summer programming.

For more information go to: www.dist50.net.

The Product
Wonderlic Opinion Survey(WOS):
The Wonderlic Survey System is designed to help your school gather strategic information on issues that impact the entire business and educational process.

Surveys are designed and implemented by Wonderlic professionals to meet each schools particular need.

Surveys can be customized and targeted to gather information from a variety of stakeholder groups, including: students, faculty, parents and local employers.

Wonderlic survey reports are easy to understand and effectively used to plan for school improvement and meet accreditation standards.

The key to surveying employees about training, is thinking outside of their niche. That was the approach taken by Kim Burke, Director of Human Resources for the K-8 Woodland school district in Gurnee, IL, and she made some surprising discoveries. “We wanted to know if our people felt that they were getting training in areas they actually needed and wanted,” she says. Instead of limiting staff to questions about training in their core areas, every group was given the opportunity to comment on their interest in all potential training offerings, from computer skills and teacher training, to how to lift heavy objects. “In order to know how you will prioritize training for each category, you need to know what specific training needs employees are interested in to help them fulfill their job responsibilities.”

When Burke began planning to overhaul the district's training program two years ago, she knew she needed feedback from staff on what they liked and what they felt was missing, but she wasn’t sure how to collect it. The school district has more than 800 employees in teaching, administrative and support roles, and she wanted everyone's feedback. “Surveying takes a lot more time and effort than you realize,” Burke says, and she had neither the time nor the expertise to do the job. Fortunately, during a brainstorming meeting with parents, teachers and administration, a parent in the district brought the Wonderlic survey tools and services to Burke’s attention. It was just what she needed, she says, because not only do Wonderlic survey consultants produce and manage the survey data, they help clients customize the questions to address their specific needs and phrase them in a way that will deliver the most valuable results. Burke adds, “It is obvious that this is Wonderlic’s area of expertise.”

Burke met with Greg Olsen, a Wonderlic consultant, who walked her through the entire survey development process. They discussed the existing training situation in the district; where she perceived the gaps to be; what the goals and desired outcomes of the project were; and the kinds of data she wanted to receive to ensure the survey would deliver the most value. “Greg was great. He helped us throughout the entire process," she says. "He added great insight to the survey process and he was extremely cooperative, flexible and timely.”

Beginning with the support staff survey, Olsen conducted a targeted-needs analysis with Burke and her team. Based on those discussions, he created a skeleton set of questions, then worked with experts in the district to flesh it out. “By doing the needs analysis with a team of experts from the district we came up with topics and areas of interest that we were sure would be important to staff members,” Olsen says. Burke agrees. “Using the team approach to generate ideas and questions was important for us to gain maximum results from our survey.”

One of the most unique features of the survey was that it solicited feedback from everyone on training they would like to take that may not be specific to their positions. It gave them a chance to offer their feedback on training topics that they might never have been asked about but always wanted to study. “We wanted them to feel like they had the opportunity to provide their input,” she says. “Then we could combine that with what we felt they needed.”

The resulting survey was long and fairly specific, but it covered everything Burke wanted to cover. It was broken down by training for: job need, personal needs, and procedural needs. Each participant was able to comment on how happy they were with existing training and their interest in new training opportunities. The survey also asked when they would like to receive training – weekends, school breaks, or summer vacation – and included a comment section where participants could write in additional thoughts.

The final survey for support staff was distributed earlier this year, and because Burke wanted as many responses as possible, she had supervisors give staff members time off during the day to complete it. The strategy worked — of the 250 support staff, she received 202 completed surveys. To add anonymity to the process, every survey came with a sealable envelope, and the finished surveys were delivered directly to Wonderlic, eliminating the chance for Burke or other management members to read survey responses directly and connect them to individual staffers. “That confidentiality was important to the union, and it made the employees feel more comfortable being totally honest,” Burke says.

Within days, Wonderlic delivered a detailed report, summarizing the overall responses for each category, and breaking it down by job title so Burke could see which employees were most interested in which types of training. “The final report from Wonderlic was easy to read and proved to be very meaningful,” she says. Many of things she learned from the survey data were expected — administrative employees wanted more computer training and teacher’s assistants were interested in all kinds of training. However, others were surprising. The most unexpected result was that maintenance and custodial staff members were very interested in learning more about students with special needs, such as autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). “They have a lot of interaction with the students and they want to know how to better communicate with them and handle situations that arise the best that they can,” Burke says.

She was also surprised to discover that no one was interested in quit smoking programs. “That one made us chuckle.”

Moving Forward: An Action Plan
Now that she has reviewed the data, Burke is ready to pursue phase two of her survey strategy — deliver the results to the staff. She began by sharing the result report with directors, principals and supervisors. She is also arranging small group meetings during the last month of the school year to go over the training categories that garnered the most interest and discuss what programs can be offered immediately without much budget. Some initial targets are workers compensation training to cover safety and OSHA topics, and autism seminars hosted by other teachers.

She is also planning a full training program for next year to address the highest needs courses based on survey results. Her final plan will be delivered to every staff member in the Welcome Back to School package that is sent out in August, and included in Friday Flash email newsletters. “We want people to know we are responding to their survey data and there’s more than one way to communicate that,” Burke says. “By using multiple formats, we make sure the information doesn’t fall through the cracks.”

That dissemination of results and action plans is a critical part of the survey process to maintain support and buy-in from staff members.” Ignoring survey data can do more to hurt a school than if it hadn’t done the survey at all,” Olsen says. “When schools do respond with targeted action plans, the staff recognizes its willingness to strive for improvement, and that goes a long way toward building good will.”