Be the Change: Westbury Christian School’s Student Survey

(From left) Christina Murphy, Brenton Smith, and Mr. Mark Krimm work together on editing the Survey Report for presentation to the School Board.

This year at Westbury Christian School, the school gained a new football coach and psychology teacher, Mr. Mark Krimm. I have had the pleasure of being in his AP psychology class and, for the past few weeks, our class has been working on something new. Mr. Krimm wanted to create something that could represent how the students felt about the school and then enact a change that would help the school to make it a more enjoyable experience for the students. So he gave the psychology class a project.

Our project began with us sitting down and talking about what areas we thought the school needed improvement on. Being four seniors - all of us having been at the school three years or longer - we had a lot of things to say about the school. After we had finished venting, we created sections that we wanted to test, including the social environment, and then divided into staff-student relationships, student-student relationships, and school pride – plus the academic environment - including curriculum and instruction.

Within these sections, we created survey questions that would adequately test each area of the school like “The WCS staff is approachable” or “I am able to apply the curriculum to everyday life.” With these questions, we used a likert scale ranging from 1 to 5 in which 5 means “strongly agree” and 1 means “strongly disagree.”

From there, we distributed the surveys to every high school bible class throughout one day so that everyone would get the chance to take the survey. Then we had around 300 surveys to enter into an Excel document.  The following week, we deciphered the data and wrote a report from the results that the data showed. The week returning from spring break, our class will present the report to the administration, highlighting the areas where the students believed the high school needed improvement.

The data that resulted showed that the school had a few issues. Students dislike the fact that our high school doesn’t have prom and many students aren’t satisfied with the food offered in our cafeteria. According to the data, WCS has an environment students feel safe in with their friends and their peers and reported that most of their closest friends were inside the school.

The AP psychology class will present our report about our findings before the school’s administration next week.