As an organization, our goal is to improve mental health and well-being in schools. Each semester, we update our offerings to ensure that they are as helpful as possible to our partner schools. We make these updates based on current scientific research, findings from our work, and in response to feedback from our partner schools.
Our most recent round of updates, available to schools surveying in the 2022-2023 school year, focuses on streamlining our operations processes to make it easier to collaborate with our team, simplifying dashboard navigation to help users quickly find information, and updating survey measures based on the latest research.
Read on to learn more about the high-level changes and improvements we’ve made in our latest release, or click the button below to complete our interest form.
We are excited to announce the launch of our Collaboration Checklist, which will make it even easier to work with our team to administer surveys. We know that launching any initiative within a community involves collaboration and sign off from a number of stakeholders and have designed our Collaboration Checklist with this in mind.
The Collaboration Checklist contains essential links, documents, and deadlines to ensure that school stakeholders have access to all of the important materials in one centralized place
Communication with our team about questions, concerns, or status updates will be simplified as our team will be notified any time a change is made within the Collaboration Checklist
The AC collaboration checklist makes it even easier to work with our team and keep all stakeholders up to date
Launching Our Support Team
While we do our best to make our surveys, results dashboards, presentations, and documentation as clear as possible, we know that additional questions will inevitably arise. We’re excited to announce that we’ve launched a Client Support Team to help address your questions in a timely manner. Starting this Fall, if you have any questions, the quickest way to contact our team will be an email to support@authconn.com or to complete our support request form.
Fall 2022 Survey Updates
Across all of our surveys, we’ve made updates to the demographic questions and response options to ensure that they are as clear and inclusive as possible. We’ve also added a number of new measures to our surveys, some of which are outlined below:
High Achieving Schools Survey (HASS) and Student Resilience Survey (SRS)
Our student surveys for grades 6-12 have been updated to gather more information about the support that students need to thrive. Students will now be asked about how accessible and safe mental health services at school are and will be able to provide open-ended feedback* about policies, practices, or traditions that could be modified to increase feelings of inclusion and belonging on campus.
Children’s Resilience Survey (CRS)
The Children’s Resilience Survey for grades 2-5 was launched in January 2021 to give administrators a sense of how their younger students were feeling. Since its initial launch, the CRS has been expanded to ask about more aspects of school climate, such as feelings of academic and emotional support from teachers; this fall, we have built on this work and added new measures of equity, fairness, and peer relationships to help administrators better understand what matters most for these students.
Faculty Resilience Survey (FRS)
Rates of faculty / staff burnout at work reached ~75% toward the end of the 2021-2022 academic year. The newest version of the Faculty Resilience Survey has been designed to help administrators further understand policies and practices at school that may be mitigating, or furthering, feelings of burnout. New items about the perceived division of responsibilities, sources of emotional support on campus, and the concerns of working parents will help schools ensure that they are supporting faculty and staff in the ways they need.
Parent Resilience Survey (FRS)
The Parent Resilience Survey has been further refined to gather actionable information from parents and families. Mirroring items on our student surveys for grades 6-12, parents will be asked about how safe and accessible mental health resources are at school. We’ve also refined our questions about school communications to help schools understand how to make communication with parents as simple, clear, and helpful as possible. Finally, to help schools provide and design effective parent programming, parents will now be asked to provide feedback about topics, such as social media and substance use, for which they would like support from the school.
Fall 2022 Results Dashboard Updates
Norm Comparisons by Semester Surveyed
In the past, users have been able to view their data relative to all other schools surveyed**, and could compare with a more granular sample based on region, type of school (e.g., public, independent), or by population served (e.g., single-gender schools). Users will now also be able to compare their results with those from surveys administered in the same semester, in addition to comparing with data collected from all schools surveyed over time**. For example, if a school administers the Student Resilience Survey in fall 2022, they will be able to compare their results to those from other schools that also surveyed in fall 2022, and can also compare to the aggregate sample of all student data over time**. Users will still be able to refine the samples of semester-weighted norms and all-time norms to compare results to similar schools (by type, region, population served).
New Dashboard: Sample Norm Demographics
We’ve introduced a new dashboard to provide additional information about the available comparison sample.
Streamlined Navigation
In response to feedback from partner schools, we have simplified navigation on the dashboards. Users will now be able to use a drop-down menu to navigate to different sections of the findings.
Enhanced Formatting
Updated formatting will make it easier to compare sub-groups and understand how findings have shifted over time
Access to Sample Size
In addition to the percentage of respondents, users will now also have access to the number of participants who selected a response option.
We are very excited about the updates we’ve made this summer. We would like to extend a sincere thank you to our partner schools who have helped us identify these areas to streamline. These updates will help us to strengthen our work together to improve mental health and well-being in schools.
Notes:
* This question is still in beta development; responses will not be formally analyzed, but verbatim data will be reported to each school
** All schools surveyed since March 2020, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic
Fall 2022 Offerings
The High Achieving Schools Survey (HASS): long-form survey for grades 6-12
The Student Resilience Survey (SRS): short-form survey for grades 6-12
The Children’s Resilience Survey (CRS): short-form survey for grades 2-5
Faculty (and Staff) Resilience Survey (FRS) for all faculty and staff
Parent (and Guardian) Resilience Survey (PRS) for students’ parents and families
