Editor-in-Chief, Luca MacDouall, of the SLOHS Expressions magazine shares details about the San Luis Obispo Unified School District’s survey plans with YouthTruth. You can read the full article here.
Anxiety and stress seem to be rising issues in United States high schools, and San Luis Obispo High School is no exception. Higher expectations placed on students, lack of communication between teachers and students, and increasing difficulty in college admissions are all causes on a general level, but for each unique campus there are equally unique causes for stress.
Seeing as these are difficult problems for administrators to handle, SLCUSD superintendent Eric Prater has decided to hire the nonprofit YouthTruth to survey the majority of students around the district to find the issues plaguing our campuses and their roots.
“Teachers should consider their students’ mental health and their home lives, and they shouldn’t put any unnecessary pressure on them,” said sophomore Lindsey Egbert. Students like Egbert have opinions on how to better the school, and this is what Prater is looking for.
YouthTruth is a national nonprofit that has worked in 37 states and four countries, including Russia, Singapore, and Thailand. The organization surveys at least 75 percent of a campus’s students and anonymously gathers information about the student body’s opinions on certain aspects of the school. The survey asks students about their backgrounds—such as race or ethnicity, economic status, gender, grade level, and academic success—so that the administration can figure out what specific issues are affecting different demographics. The survey takes about twenty minutes and will be administered at SLOHS between October 16 and October 27.
Roughly a month later, the results will be returned to the school district, and Prater will work with a group of students from SLOHS, Laguna Middle School, Los Osos Middle School, Pacific Beach High School, and Morro Bay High School to convert the data into real change on each campus. The data collected will also be presented to students so they can see what issues are felt on a large scale at school. For more information, visit the website youthtruthsurvey.org.