Recently, the USD 348 school board and administration sent out a community survey to gather opinions on the importance of many different aspects in the students’ educational lives. They sorted the results into different categories and they were, parents, community, students, and parents/staff. Surveyors selected the five aspects they thought were most important and would rate them on a scale of 1-5.

Throughout the survey, it was fairly clear to see that academics are more important averaging between a 4 and 4.5 on the scale in all four categories. However, in the student category, college was only about ten votes behind academics. This difference in numbers was the closest between academics and any other possibility. In contrast, the community and staff thinks that preparing for a career is more important. In fact, staff members rated college at fifth most important behind academics, career, safety, and staff.

“A lot of times, I remember I thought college would be my career after high school and was more important to look at than a career,” principal Rob McKim said. “However, now that I am older, I see that a career is probably more important to prepare for because of two reasons. Some kids will not go to college and will go straight into the workforce, and even the kids who do go to college will still have a career in a way with all their schooling and they may work as well. My other reason is that a career path impacts many students’ decisions on where they would like to attend college.”

Throughout the survey, there is a direct correlation between the differences in students’ opinions on importance and adults’. Besides academics, students contradict adults on practically every other subject. Possibly the largest difference between student opinion and adult opinion is in the activity category where students rated activities at about a 2.5 and parents, community, and staff rated it at about an average of 1.

“I think the difference has to do with the students actually being involved in the activities so they find it more important,” social studies teacher and girls basketball coach Bob Martin said. “I believe the opinions differentiate mainly due to the parents thinking long-term while the students are not thinking near as far in the future and are focusing on having fun during school.”

The point of the survey the survey taken was to get feedback from members of the community on how to improve our school district. As a result, there could be some new aspects of learning put into use for the years to come.