From: Brossoit, Nick [mailto:BrossoitN@edmonds.wednet.edu]Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 5:41 PM
To: Tatia Prieto; Bonseiro, Francis C.; Miller, Marla (ESC)
Subject: RE: Regarding Diagnostic Survey
September 14, 2007
Tatia and Frank,
To give you some idea of the danger of this blog site to the integrity of the performance audit. The web blog is hosted by a former and very disgruntled employee who features anonymous postings, many of which he creates and which report inaccurate information about the district and employees. He is very anti-district administration. He currently has filed a claim with the district which is being addressed by our district administration and Risk Management Pool legal counsel. His blog with this survey link creates a situation which allows unauthorized people to complete surveys and contaminate or distort input of the performance audit process. How do we address this in a responsive manner?
Sincerely,
Nick
From: Brossoit, Nick
Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2007 5:40 PM
To: Tatia Prieto; Miller, Marla (ESC)
Cc: 'Linda Recio'
Subject: RE: Regarding Diagnostic Survey
Tatia,
This helps to understand how the survey data is used by you the contractor for the process, and we welcome any inquiry into any aspects of the district administration and operations. However, it is very troubling that this level of security and survey contamination by the non-employee "blog" link appears to be passing through into the process. If it is 1, 10 or 20 surveys that were not to be included due to the motive of the author(s), we would like some type of technological screen if you can do it to identify and exclude those from this source. I personally have 24 years of service in public education in the state of Washington with the most recent now going on 14 years as a well respected superintendent. I am not perfect and always open to have any constructive feedback for myself, any of the staff under my supervision, or for any system in which I serve. However, to consider that the performance audit survey results for our district will include the input from this former employee who has a claim filed against the district and who is promoting false and very disrespectful comments from anonymous sources about district employees, it is simply not acceptable to have the survey results in any form made public. Who is it with the SAO office that I would need to press this concern? I can understand the contractor doing other research in person with folks, that makes sense. I cannot understand how the contractor would allow any of the survey results to be posted. I also would think that the SAO office would take legal action against the owner of the "blog" for contaminating a state funded, and state controlled audit process. Please forward this to the SAO administrator responsible for the performance audit. If I need to take the matter to Brian Sontag or seek legislative intervention into this process to have this blog issue addressed as it has impacted our survey, I am very willing to move that direction.
Sincerely,
Nick
Blog: Just to be clear, Brossoit believes the survey results are contaminated but the new administration site isn't. I will post a pdf of the email traffic shortly. It contains these messages and several more.
5 comments:
How much did the district spend on this survey? How come the results were never published?
When you take a survey, you can't pick and choose which data you will include or exclude simply because you don't like the data or the source of the data. But is not surprising that an attempt would be made to change it.
Data was frequently compromised in our "building survey" at MMS. After the survey was bubbled in, staff had the opportunity to make anonymous written comments. It was not well understood that the comments were ONLY viewed by the principal. Teachers, however, DID know enough not to make these comments in handwritten form because that was an ID of the author; they were afraid to hand word processed comments into the designated collection point (the office manager) for the same reason. Once I offered (as building union rep) to collect comments myself and turn them in at one time and I was excoriated in public for not being a trusting person! The graphs for the '05-'06 survey did not match the previous year's graphs; they made the change (for the worse) of the attitude toward the administration seem smaller than it actually was. Was this carelessness or design?
Brossoit seems to be actively campaigning to manipulate the results of the survey for his own purposes. This seems a breach of trust with parents and taxpayers.
In other words, it seems to be OK for the District to compromise data by making it clear that opinions critical of the administration might impact your job or working conditions, but not OK for the workers to figure out a way to potentially manipulate data.
And notice how Brossoit threatens to use his "pull" with state auditor Sontag against the opposition. This is a bullying tactic.
Could this possibly be the reason that the auditor's office found only minor problems with the District?
I have piles of records to go through, but my position is that of the Auditor's on this matter. They felt that District employees are honest and would only fill out the survey once.
While Nick and his henchmen would ensure broad circulation among his allies, I wanted to make sure that people from a slightly different perspective would have an opportunity to fill in the survey.
I suspect there was a lot of negativity. In fact, I have heard from several P-12 allies that the survey was horrendous.
As a former employee of the ESD, I just placed my survey in the shredder in my office each year, after the first time I completed a survey and viewed the results, I was convinced this was just another example of the "District" trying to make employees feel that one's opinion was valued. JUST ANOTHER HOAX.
Yes, most people are honest, but by the time we were completing the '05-'06 survey, there was an attitude that we needed to emphasize our point by bubbling in the "extremes", the ones and the fives. This was occuring with the folks on the other side of the issue as well. I also made a concerted effort to get all staff members to complete the survey since there was an historic 20% who didn't participate.
The '04-'05 building survey first indicated that there was a split developing in the staff. The normal bell curve had begun to turn into a "U" curve meaning that the staff was being polarized for and against the administrator. When I tried to point this out and express concern for what this might mean for the future, I was treated discourteously by one of the principal's allies in front of the entire staff. The '05-'06 survey results were worse, though the incorrect graphs masked the growing problem. Union officials didn't think the survey supported my conclusions; I'm not sure what the curve would look like at the point at which they would become concerned.
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