My first take on the phone survey results

Yesterday I posted a summary and the full report of the phone survey about the proposed "balanced calendar" that was conducted by the automated telephone system by the Central Office last week.

When I spoke in person to the School Board about this issue (excerpted here) on Nov. 21, I told it,

The proposed calendar affects far more than teachers, administrators and school families. It is a profound mistake to see this proposed calendar as simply a schools issue.

This calendar will affect almost every aspect of life in Williamson County, including businesses, churches, preschools and summer programs. All of these activities, as well as many business-revenue cycles, are tied closely to the existing calendar.

This proposal is not just another item on the to-do list for the Board. It is tremendous in scope and needs to be treated that way. While I recognize that this board has the legal authority to take the decision to emplace the calendar, I urge you to understand that the scope of this proposal goes so far beyond schools alone as to remove from your jurisdiction either the social or moral authority to decide this proposal. I therefore move, not as a board member but as a voter, that after the board's deliberations of the proposal are complete, that you place this issue before all the county's residents in a referendum.

I wrote of the then-upcoming phone survey,

The process for this calendar's adoption excludes informed public comment and debate. Ordinarily, the proposed calendar is announced, the board receives comments from those who wish to make them, and the calendar is approved.

But this is not ordinary. It is a very major change. Routine procedures should not be used. Frankly, public servants in elective offices should have figured this out on their own.

So now the survey has been done and the results are released.

We still do not know what Williamson County thinks about the proposed calendar. The survey does not tell us that.

We have said from the beginning that a change of this magnitude affects the county at large, not just school families, teachers and staff. Yet no one but teachers and school families have been surveyed.

The methodology for the survey was inadequate. Teachers have told us they were not permitted to study closely the materials given them, were told they could not take them home and many were asked to respond to their survey almost immediately after being given it.

Parents were given an extremely brief summary of the proposed change with entirely one-sided arguments in its favor, and after only one weekend were asked to approve it or not, with nothing to compare it to. And the flyer was sent home with students, which the Central Office does not even trust doing for report cards after 5th grade.

Despite Director Rebecca Sharber's protestations that she is trying to engage us "in a conversation," neither her office nor the School Board have actually attempted to engage the families nor the wider community in open, public discussion about the calendar. The only public forum held so far was at Brentwood HS late last month and was called and sponsored by a parents' group. For the parents and the community, this whole thing has been a "do it yourself" project.

The volume and level of public discourse has been very low and very little, due entirely to the flawed methodology of the Central Office and calendar committee in bringing this calendar before the Board.

Even though the survey resulted in only 45 percent "for" responses - meaning that it actually validates the traditional calendar - we insist that the survey's defects are so profound and misleading as to make it valueless for guiding countywide policy. The entire electorate has a stake in this issue. The only way accurately to measure the electorate's desires is by referendum, because democracies operate by voting, not by responding to catch as catch can polling.