Mom Questions Schools' Survey on School Opening Date

On January 27th Virginia State House Bill number 1433 died in subcommittee. The purpose of the bill, sponsored by Delegate Thomas A. Greason ( R)-House district 32, would have been to give local school boards the power to open schools before Labor Day. Since 1986, a Virginia law, known as “The Kings Dominion Law” because of the backing it receives from the Virginia Travel and Tourism industry, has kept Virginia schools from opening prior to Labor Day.

 Two more members of the McLean Moms Council weigh in on this question today.

Kathleen Weil,McLean Mom of 3 girls, one in a McLean public elementary school, and two in private preschool

Online surveys are a quick and inexpensive method to collect data.  However, as noted by Dillman (2000)*, “the eagerness to design and implement Web surveys has also revealed a frightening downside;  a willingness to equate large numbers of respondents, recruited by whatever means, with survey accuracy.”

Just because many people answered the FCPS on whether to start school before Labor Day does not mean the survey results are “valid” (that is, that generalizations can be made based on these respondents’ answers). 

FCPS reported last week that  majority of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) families and employees support opening schools one week before Labor Day, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, a FCPS survey shows.

,  FCPS surveyed its parents and staff members and found that 64 percent of 10,687 parents who responded and 71 percent of 12,562 employees who responded were in favor of beginning school before Labor Day.  

People interested in an issue that a web survey is focused on generally self-select and answer the survey.  This leads to bias, which means the survey results do not represent the views of the population as a whole.  Policy should not be constructed from flawed data, whether it represents the position one supports or not. 

If our officials are going to use survey information to create and implement policy, data should be collected from a representative sample of the FCPS system parents and teachers.

*Dillman, “Mail and Internet Surveys”, Wiley & Sons. (2000)