Congratulations on closing out the 22-23 school year! We are so proud of everything you did this year and we hope you have a wonderful and relaxing summer break.

Before you leave for the summer, we want to share some of the results of the End of Year Survey with you. This survey is an important way we capture DSST staff perception on our mission, our work and how we feel being part of this community. This is powerful feedback, especially as it helps us guide the implementation of our strategic plan this year. Below is a summary of what we heard and how we are responding. 

Bright Spots:

• Positive overall perception: Overall, nine out of 10 DSST staff report a positive perception of working at DSST! This is a testament to the strong community we’ve worked hard to build together as a collective team. 
• Meaningful work with families + communities: DSST staff feel like their work here is meaningful, especially as we deepen our engagement with our families and the greater community. 
• Growth around data-driven instruction: It’s worth noting that questions with the most year-over-year growth centered on staff perception of administering assessments and using data frequently. These are strong building blocks for data-driven cycles, which will be a core component of achieving outcomes in our strategic plan. 

Opportunities for improvement:

A few themes emerged as specific opportunities for us to grow as an organization, which are similar themes to our mid-year survey.

• Valuing our people & identities: An opportunity emerged around ensuring we demonstrate a commitment to the well-being of our staff, including different life circumstances and our identities. We are actively continuing our work to make sure you feel seen, valued and understood, including: 
  • Incorporating a full week off for Thanksgiving Break and two additional days of Paid Time Off (PTO) for 2023-24. 
  • Delivering development on equitable people practices and embedding DEI development for all DSST leadership and staff to address dominant culture norms. 
  • Conducting DSST Network Equity Audit for 2023-2024 (via outside agency).
• School culture: Another opportunity emerged around school culture. We are actively implementing our culture initiative to address this challenge, including the following steps below:
  • Network-level: At a network level, we are actively working to build out our aligned culture approach with our culture initiative, which includes:
    • Aligning on network beliefs, vision, and playbook with common systems, including a common behavior-tracking platform.
    • Piloting Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum at all schools in preparation for the year three rollout of stronger SEL programming.
• School-level: Schools are already actively supporting our culture initiative for the launch of the 23-24 school year:
  • Flesh out stronger minute-to-minute plans that fit their schools.
  • Internalize and own the culture plans as their own.
  • Focus on strong execution of culture plans as plans alone are insufficient.
  • Support and hold staff accountable to not overly relying on culture systems and ensure staff are grounded in relationship building with students and families.

Thank you again for all of your helpful, transparent feedback.  It is a gift that we will leverage as we implement our strategic plan to achieve our mission for our students.  We look forward to seeing you in August for the 23-24 school year!