State survey: How do you want tax dollars spent on education?

Ever wish you could have a say in how the state spends your tax dollars on education?

Starting today you can.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal has launched a first of its kind online survey asking you to rank what’s most important when it comes to spending money on education.

The survey focuses on 15 specific issues within three categories: Support for students, support for teachers, and school buildings and facilities.

Reykdal says people taking the survey are asked to rank the importance of things such as class size reduction, retaining teachers, and more.

“Additional support services for students and then we give examples like counseling and mental health and things like that. School safety is a very specific item, expanded learning opportunities you know after school stuff and summer. We ask about programs very specifically-targeted for students of color or those experiencing gaps in our system. You know, [the questions aren’t] totally surprising. I think hopefully the surprise is that we’re asking.”

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Reykdal says the survey will be in two parts.

“The first survey says what is your relative sort of importance on each of these issues. So, it has them look at each one and say, oh, you know this is not important to me all the way up to this is extremely important to me. We’ll use that to help shape our budget and then we’ll go back out to them in a month-and-a-half or so and say this is what we heard, these are some general concepts that we’re going to pursue in our budget request. Now, once we have those, tell us how you’d prioritize those. Which one would be top of your list? Which one would be bottom of your list? That’s the two parts to it.”

He is hoping everyone will take part in the survey, including teachers, parents, and students.

“We sure hope it gets to students. We have some really basic demographics. We don’t grab any personal information from people, they don’t even have to give us their name, but we do ask them you know, are you in school today, if so are you a teacher, an administrator, a student, a school board member, or parent? And so we’ll be able to discern whether students have a really different sense of priorities than say teachers or community members.”

Now that the Legislature believes it’s done what’s necessary to meet the McCleary mandate to fully fund basic education, Reykdal says it’s important to look beyond the “basic” when we’re talking about education spending, especially because our state still invests less in education than the national average.

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And, he says, this survey is a great tool to help him tell the governor and lawmakers what’s important to the people when he presents his budget.

“They really give us robust ways to sort of take the temperature of folks, you know is mental health a higher priority relative to something else? Is safety really ramping up compared to you know school facilities for example? It’s a relative sense of priority of the public and that helps us out a lot.”

And Reykdal says the answers they get in this survey won’t fall on deaf ears.

“It really counts. It takes less than five minutes. It shapes significantly our sense of priorities in our budget. And again for the first time, I think it will expose that maybe the average voter has a different opinion on the set of priorities than maybe even the education system and certainly probably different than legislators. So I think we all win because people get to actually shape this budget and we will truly use the information and I think the governor and our office and the Legislature will all learn something from that feedback.

The initial survey went live today and will remain active until Friday, June 8 at 5 p.m.

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