Goal 2: Progress Updates
Read the current year Strategy 2 updates below, or read previous updates in the accordions labeled by year.
Report 2: February 9, 2026
At the third committee meeting on November 17, 2025, the Climate, Culture and Equity survey participation rates from 2024 were compared to that of 2025. The committee felt positive that our changes to the survey this year helped to increase participation. When families have multiple ways to complete a survey, such as by paper or online through QR codes, the participation is hopefully easier.
The increase in survey participation was also noted as one factor that affects the percentage change in data from 2024 to 2025. For example, some elementaries had a very large increase in their parent participation numbers this year, and if they had low participation last year that was all positive, even having one negative survey this year changed the percentage rate negatively on some questions.
Additionally, the committee had further discussion on how to make more improvements to collect feedback. We discussed moving the survey to later in the school year since new families to the district may need more time to be able to feel comfortable answering questions. Additional questions the committee would like to add to the survey include “How many students do you have attending this school?” and “Select the grade levels of your student(s)” and “How long has your family attended Derby Public Schools?”
The feedback gained from families is very important and lends itself to being very useful to building leadership teams and staff, but we want families to not be inundated with surveys too, so the committee asked about potentially combining surveys that parents receive to reduce the number that we ask them to complete. For example, the Strategy 3 committee, Student & Staff Support for Special Services, also sent out a family survey in close timing to our survey. One idea we continued to explore was having the two committees work together to develop a single survey.
Our fourth committee meeting was on January 20, 2026. At this meeting, we reviewed comments that were made by students and parents on the survey (no identifying information was shared). The wide variety of comments have been shared with each individual building principal, who in turn, is using the collected data to inform their building teams and make improvements. Examples of positive school culture activities are being shared, such as the Christmas stocking gifts at Oaklawn with the help of Derby Middle School students, the Red Cross Blood Drive at Derby North Middle School, and the Character Strong monthly awards given out to students. Updated cell phone violation numbers were requested at the last meeting and were shared. Looking ahead to our final two meetings of the year, we will be reviewing discipline data in comparison to last year. We will also be forming our 26-27 committee goals. Our fifth meeting will be February 17, 2026, and our final meeting is scheduled for April 7, 2026.
Report 1: November 24, 2025
At our first meeting on September 2, 2025, the committee revisited their norms from last year and agreed to keep them the same. The definitions of Climate and Culture were reviewed. Copies of last year’s parent and student surveys were reviewed as well, with changes to the wording recommended on several questions. The committee felt that some parents may not be able to have an answer to each question, so giving the option of “not enough information” on questions would be wise. The committee discussed at length how to increase the number of parents that complete the survey. Parents shared that just having a survey link or a QR code may be a barrier for parents that do not have internet access or cell phone minutes. The committee agreed that having paper copies of the surveys available at Parent-Teacher conferences may help with this. Incentives to get people to complete the survey were also discussed, such as allowing an optional name to be submitted at the end of the survey, and that name being entered into a drawing for prizes.
Attendees also discussed that sharing what is being done currently in all buildings to increase a positive climate and culture needs to be shared. Principals were surveyed and results were shared at the second committee meeting.
Committee members felt that a hashtag campaign of #WhyGreenisMagicforMe could be a great way to allow people to flood social media with their love for Derby and the magic of the Green. This will be shared with the Communications Department as an idea.
At our second committee meeting on October 9, 2025, the new parent and student surveys were shared. QR code flyers for each building were shared. The paper copies of the survey were available for committee members to review if they liked. It was discussed and decided that the surveys are open and ready to be shared out. Principals received all of the necessary links, paper copies and QR flyers on October 2, 2025. Also at this meeting, the discipline data from the first nine weeks of the 2025-2026 school year was shared. Data was shared only from the district level, and any categories with less than 10 reported incidents were NOT reported. (For example, each type of bullying had only one reported incident in the first nine weeks of school. If this data had been shared, it could lead to a student being identified, so to protect student privacy, we do not report out data of less than 10 incidents.) Committee members were able to ask questions about the data, but overall, the feeling was very positive as the major behavior category numbers were fairly low.
Additionally, principals had completed a short survey for the committee that listed all of the activities done at each building that are directly related to making positive culture and climate change. The seven page document was shared with the committee. Staff were encouraged to share this document with their own buildings as a way to generate ideas that could be implemented in their own buildings.
At the November 17, 2025 committee meeting, we reviewed the results of the parent and student surveys.