Soon after assuming his new position, current Superintendent Nathan Hale wanted to ensure that the district was doing all it could to address these trends and get ahead of them. Kiptum Consulting was hired to conduct an evaluation of the culture and climate at each of LCS’s eight schools and the district as a whole was designed and formally launched in October of 2023. 

After the Supt. Hale presented question options to the district leadership team, he and Kiptum collaborated to choose the items that would be part of the final version of the survey. The online, multiple choice survey was then built with 55 questions over seven categories, with three optional open-ended questions. Soon after, the survey was shared with all teachers and school-based staff who were given two weeks to complete it. Two weeks after the closing of the survey administration window, the interactive data analysis tool was shared with Supt. Hale. 

Rather than presenting static summary visualizations of the data, this tool allows for richer self-directed analysis at various levels of aggregation and detail--all while keeping individual responses totally anonymous. The tool is designed with three pages that each provide a different view of the data: 

• The Category Summary page, shows a high level summary of responses in each of the survey categories. 

• The Category Detail page allows for a more detailed look at responses to each question within a single category.

• The School Comparison page displays each school on a scatter plot to compare their aggregate responses in each category or individual question.

Each of the pages can be filtered by school and teacher years of experience--which were the only identifiers for respondents at the district's request in order to ensure anonymity. Kiptum also built individual school versions of the analysis tool that removed other schools' data and presented an aggregate district average for all data points to still allow for meaningful comparison.  

After the interactive reports had been shared, Kiptum took a closer look at each school's data in order to identify areas to dig deeper into during each of the eight school-based staff focus groups. These took place in December, with Kiptum making in-person visits to each building to facilitate the discussions. While the conversations were recorded, participant comments were kept anonymous for the purposes of analysis and reporting. During these visits to Lancaster, interviews were conducted with each school leader and a handful of district administrators as well.

With a wealth of data collected, Kiptum set to writing a number of summary reports to guide further analysis and suggest next steps:

• Individual School Reports were first shared with each school leader, providing greater school-centered detail on the research findings. Each included a set of recommendations to address challenges that were within each school leader's locus of control. These were also each shared with district leadership.

• The District Report, rather than re-hash findings and recommendations from the school reports, covered broader themes and suggested next steps that fell within the locus of control of the district leadership team.