Why Teachers Ask For Parent Survey Responses: What Actually Happens With Your Input
The coffee in my mug is lukewarm, there’s a crushed cheese cracker stuck between the G and H keys of my classroom keyboard, and I just counted the returned surveys for our proposed after-school enrichment club one more time: 18 out of 32. It’s 5:10 on a Tuesday, and I need to leave in 15 minutes to pick up my own second grader from his aftercare, so I’m leaning back in my chair and re-reading the email a parent sent me last night: I’m so swamped this week, sorry I haven’t filled this out. Is this actually required, or just district busywork?
I get it. I’m a teacher and a parent, so I know what the pile of paper and unread emails looks like when you walk in the door after work. Last week alone, I got three survey requests from my son’s elementary school: one about bus routes, one about parent-teacher conference preferences, and one about new playground equipment. I only filled out the conference one. The other two required logging into a new portal I don’t have a password for, and I just closed the tab and forgot. So I don’t blame anyone for letting this slip.
But this isn’t just busywork, not for me. Our district has a small grant pool for new school programs, but to qualify, we need to prove that at least 60% of our families are interested in the program we’re proposing. We’re 10 responses short right now. If we don’t hit that mark, the grant application gets tossed, and the art and gardening club we’ve been talking about with the kids since the start of the year doesn’t happen this semester.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that who responds to surveys skews the data almost as much as the questions we ask. The people who usually fill out surveys right away are either really excited about the thing we’re proposing, or really unhappy with the current way things are. The huge group of people in the middle—people who would use the club, don’t have strong feelings one way or another, just forgot to send the response back—are the ones we’re missing right now. Last year, I did a short survey about homework expectations. I got 22 responses out of 30, and most of them said the 30-minute nightly requirement was too much for kids with therapy appointments and sports practice. We adjusted it, cut the mandatory reading log that most kids hated, and called it a win. A month later, three different parents pulled me aside at conferences to say they’d wished we’d asked for their input sooner—they hated the reading log too, they just never got around to filling out the survey. Their input would have confirmed what the 22 respondents said, but it also would have made it easier to justify the change to the administration when they asked why we were adjusting the policy.
I’ve tried to make this as low-friction as I can. I didn’t make a 20-question survey. It’s three questions: Do you have a kid that would attend the after-school club? What days of the week work best for your family? Would you be able to volunteer for an hour once a month, if we needed extra help? That’s it. It takes 60 seconds max to fill out the Google Form, no login required, no personal information beyond your last name so I can count your family once. I sent paper copies home for anyone who doesn’t check the class email regularly, I’ve only sent two reminders so far (I hate spamming people’s inboxes), and I added a line last week that says if you don’t want to fill out the form, just reply to this email with your answers. That counts.
If you’re a parent reading this and you’ve ever gotten one of these requests, there are small, low-effort things you can do that make all the difference. You don’t have to write a paragraph about how much your kid loves art. You don’t have to fill out the optional open-ended question at the end. Even just saying “Yes, my kid would come” in a reply to my email is enough. If you lost the link, just text me through the class app. It takes me two seconds to resend it, and your text of “Thursdays work for us” is a perfectly good response. Yesterday, a parent sent me a 10-second voice note while she was waiting for her kid’s piano lesson, that was all I needed. That counts as a response. I don’t need anything fancy.
A few years ago, we did a survey about allergy-friendly snack options for class parties. We only got 15 responses. 12 of them said no nuts, which we already knew. We ordered snack boxes that were nut-free, and ended up with three kids having mild reactions because none of the respondents mentioned sesame allergies. After that, I started asking people to reply even if it’s just to confirm what we already think we know. That small bit of extra data changes the end result, more often than you’d think.
I’m about to send that third, and final, reminder right now. I added a line at the top that says “This takes less time than tying your kid’s cleats for practice, I promise.” I still need 14 responses. I don’t know if I’ll get them. There’s a girl in my class who brings me a new dandelion from the playground every morning, and she already drew a picture of the sunflower she wants to plant in the garden. If we don’t get the grant, I’ll have to tell her we have to wait until next year. I get it. Everyone’s busy. Everyone has a hundred things to do before bed tonight that are way more important than filling out a short survey for school. I just hope a few more people find that 60 seconds this week. That’s all I need.
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