Community & Belonging Survey of Students

The EE Ford Foundation is undertaking a project to understand the social-emotional well-being, sense of belonging, level of engagement, and degree of connectedness of independent high school students in the United States and Canada. The Foundation has reached out to association partners like SAIS to alert schools to this study and provide the necessary information to participate. There is no cost to individual schools and schools will receive reports comparing their own data to the aggregate data collected. If you wish to participate, please register at the link provided below.

The following information was provided by John Gulla, executive director of the EE Ford Foundation. 

We in independent schools often tell a good story about our efforts to create a strong sense of community and belonging for our students. The past two years have accentuated our need to remain focused on these objectives. For many students, the world has been turned on its end, with meaningful negative effect. 

It seems appropriate, even necessary, to study our student communities as we strive to promote the best student experience and student success. With these goals in mind, in early November, we will oversee a short survey for students in grades 9 through 12. At this time, we would like to invite your school to participate, with no fees and no strings attached. 

This survey was developed and refined with the assistance of a small group of heads of school and school counselors from the U.S. and Canada. Including 40 measures, the survey should be administered in a supervised setting, taking no more than 15 minutes to complete. 
This survey will enable us to conduct large scale quantitative analysis of the connections between student experiences and attitudes about those experiences with ratings for: 

• sense of community
• sense of belonging
• engagement within the community
• sense of emotional safety 
• and self-appraised preparedness across a list of skills, both academic and non-academic 

Additional analysis will cross-tabulate all ratings with a small number of demographic measures, including region, age, gender, and racial/cultural identity. 

This project will enable individual schools to review their own summary reports across the 40 questions, and to compare these results with aggregated findings across all participating schools.
School-specific summary reports will be provided to participating schools shortly after the survey’s administration. A full report of the aggregated results, interpretive analysis, and recommendations is targeted for the end of January 2023. This full report will be provided at no charge to all participating schools. 

Check out this generic version of the finalized questionnaire. If you choose to participate, your school’s name will appear in the upper left corner of the form.