Good morning Team, 

I hope that you are well and are enjoying the final few days of January. I want to take a moment to share my appreciation for your participation on this year's Mid-Year Survey - THANK YOU! 88% of you completed the MY survey, which gave us valuable input. I especially want to shout out our five schools with 100% completion: Cole HS, Cole MS, Elevate HS, Green Valley Ranch MS, and Montview MS. Enjoy your free breakfast - you earned it!

Below, you will find a summary of what we heard in the survey and how we are responding. 

Bright Spots: From our survey results, you all identified some important bright spots: 

• Positive perception of DSST’s mission and college-going culture: 86% of DSST staff agree or strongly agree that their school actively fosters a college-going culture inclusive of all students
  • “Being a mission-driven, values-driven organization that truly does what is best for kids and achieves excellence every year with 100% college admission is why people come to work here.”
• Strategic Priorities resulted in year-over-year increases: The three questions with the highest year-over-year increase were all associated with a strategic priority:
  • Transformational Talent: “I know about the different leadership pathway opportunities available to me” (+0.22 from 22-23 to 23-24)
  • Excellent Instruction: “I am invested in my school's literacy curriculum” (+0.11)
  • Transformational Talent: “DSST values the differences in life circumstances, such as caring for a sick loved one, a death in the family, etc.” (+0.10)

Opportunities for Improvement: After reading through all the comments in the MY Survey, two themes emerged; below, you will find a summary of these themes as well as actions we are taking to address your concerns.  

Staff well-being and bringing full self to work: Several comments focused on how staff members felt overworked, were concerned about burnout, or didn’t feel that their contributions were appropriately valued or compensated. Additionally, we have seen decreases in team members feeling they “have not felt pressured to change or hide things about [their] identity to fit in at DSST” This is unacceptable to us as an organization. We want you to feel valued as team members for the challenging work you do and celebrated for your unique identities. Here is a summary of the actions we have taken or are taking to address this:

• Compensation: Compensating our DSST team to the best of our financial means continues to be an important priority for DSST. We are in the process of getting input on options for how to further increase compensation, and we are planning input sessions with all stakeholder groups before taking next steps. We know how important it is to move quickly, yet deliberately, to make sure we collect broad input before decision-making discussions. We will have more information to share in the coming months.
• DSST Network Equity Audit: Our work in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is rooted in our View of the Human Condition and is core to our organization. It is important for us to get third party validation of our work to ensure we are doing the best work we can.  We are currently collaborating with an external partner, Systemic Educational Equity, LLC, to conduct an equity audit of DSST. We are seeking input from DSST staff, students, and families to identify areas of strength and needed improvement in our efforts to advance DEI.

Training and development: Many team members reported that they would like to see changes to the way we train and develop our talent at DSST, especially how we differentiate or support our early-career teachers. To address these concerns, we have taken or are taking the following actions:

• Training and development strategic initiative: We know we need to get better in this area. Your feedback validates that. Currently, we are creating a coherent plan to strengthen professional development for teachers as part of our strategic plan work. One focus in this work is creating more differentiated pathways for teachers.
• New teacher development initiative: We recognize we have significant work to do to strengthen our development of early-career teachers and are currently working on revamping our approach for next year. One key element of this is creating a sustained development pathway for new teachers over several years, including introducing a teacher advisory group to inform our Teacher Leadership Institute (TLI) this summer.

I want to thank you again for your thoughtful feedback. Your feedback is essential to our ability to know what we need to do to improve as an organization, and we are moving quickly to address it. Thank you for all that you do for our DSST community. 

Bill