The Needs & Wants of Education

Establishing ongoing insights into the needs and wants of our schools is crucial to being able to generate better solutions for them, their districts, students and families. Collecting this information over time helps us understand the types of gaps that exist in the system as well as the types of requests that may have otherwise been left to the side; anything from programming to events, items for the school or anything that would benefit the culture of education.

The School Resource Insights Survey is a dynamic platform (physical and digital) that offers us important information about the needs and wants of a school establishment. Differing from the Teacher Wish List, this is a broader channel that is designed to receive information from multiple bodies within the system including administrators, teachers, students and their families. The initial metrics collected are general resource insights which could be items for the school or classroom, planned trips for students or programming. However, from this initial pull, the survey is meant to react and respond to requests for each school in which it becomes school-specific and on a quarterly or semeseterly basis. There does need to be defined accountability and deadlines for submittal. Though it is not designed to be taken down, in order for communities to benefit from the results, its survival relies on incremental interactions.

Having ongoing reporting of these metrics is not only important to fulfilling insights found at a particular establishment, we also want to utilize this data to analyze and further create solutions as well as create a transparency around the datasets so that it can be shared with the city for even more analysis and on a wider scale.