Family Engagement and Climate Survey

The Ministry of Education requires that boards do school climate surveys with students, staff and families. This survey gives families an opportunity to share their experiences with their student’s school and with the school board.

The feedback helps us understand what is working well and where we can improve and can help us plan for the future. It also supports schools and school councils in building welcoming, safe, and supportive school communities.

The Family Engagement and Climate Survey is designed to be used by individual school councils and administrators, the Parent Involvement Committee, and the board to better understand families’ relationships with school. Each school council will receive its own results to use in their own planning and monitoring. Authorized staff at the board office will have access to both school level and board-wide results, while school administrators and their teams will have access limited to their own school(s). The Parent Involvement Committee and the Board of Trustees will be given board-level results. Only the Research Team will be able to see individual answers: everyone else will see group (aggregate) information. This means that the results will show what was said, but not the individuals who said it.

During collection, the survey data is stored on our survey software, Voxco, on Canadian servers. Downloaded and analyzed data is stored in LDSB’s Microsoft OneDrive on a secure internal server.

The cyber incident did not affect any systems in which survey data is collected or stored. Our internal Microsoft servers, where survey data is stored for analysis, were not affected by the incident. We have taken every precaution to protect student and family data. Our survey software, Voxco, meets the highest international privacy standards (GDPR) and is compliant with all Canadian privacy laws. The Family Engagement and Climate Survey is also anonymous, which adds another layer of protection in the event of a breach.

We keep survey data for five years after the project ends, then we delete it.

It is not likely, but there is a small risk, which we take care to prevent. The survey is anonymous, which means that no identifying information (like your name or address) are being collected. However, we are also asking demographic questions that - depending on the size and population of a school - may make it possible to identify a family indirectly when looking at the results. We protect family privacy by asking the questions about the household in general, not about specific people; by keeping the questions very broad; and by not reporting on any groups with fewer than three responses. This threshold was developed by the Research Team and administrators of smaller school sites after the 2021-2022 School Climate Survey to ensure they could still use the information being collected while protecting student and family privacy.

The risk of identifying a family goes up if they share identifying information in the open text questions. The only people reading individual family answers is the Research Team, who do not work with families directly. It is their job to make sure that none of the information shared back with schools can identify anyone.

Families will receive a central message on May 1. Reminders will be shared through school newsletters throughout the survey period and in a Director’s update.

You can ask the school administrator or the front office staff for a paper survey. They may be available right away, or they may be printed on request. You can give finished surveys back to the front office staff. They will put it in an envelope and send it back to the board office.

Yes. You can select “I prefer not to answer” to any question.

You can close the survey or click “Quit” at any time to stop participating.

No. Because the survey is anonymous, we have no way of knowing which responses are yours. Anything you answer in the survey is recorded up to the point that you quit.

You can use the back button to change your answers during your survey session, but once you submit, close, or quit the survey, you will not be able to edit your answers.

The survey should take between 20 and 30 minutes but may take more or less time.

The survey closes May 11, 2026. You can complete the survey any time between May 1 and May 11, 2026.

We hope that having the survey available in several languages and in multiple formats will allow more multilingual families to participate. The electronic version of the survey has been translated into 28 languages commonly spoken in Limestone. Families can use the translation tools in their internet browser for languages that are not on the list. All communications to families are fully translatable on demand, as is all information posted on the LDSB website. If a family needs the survey in another format and in another language, please ask the school administrator to contact the Research Team.

The survey is translatable within the survey in: English, French, Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Simplified Chinese, Dari, Filipino, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Malayalam, Nepali, Persian/Farsi, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

Yes. The survey has been tested with Google Read and Write.  Families can also respond to open text questions using Google Read and Write’s Talk and Type feature.

You can leave the survey open for up to 21 hours and come back to it several times but you cannot close it and come back to it due to some design limitations. If the surveys times out, you will need to start again.

We do not need to go into as much detail in the School Climate Survey as we did the Student Census. We learned from our Student Census experience that it is sometimes more appropriate to work with larger categories of people than small specific ones. This is especially important when we consider smaller schools that have very few students. If our categories get too small, we may be able to identify families, and we do not want to do that. We already have detailed information from the Student Census. Since we cannot cross-reference anonymous School Climate data with confidential Student Census data, we do need to ask high level identity questions to get a sense of how students’ and families’ identities intersect with school climate.