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Dear Editor:
Fishers One, a leading grassroots advocacy organization, is applauding the decision made by the Hamilton Southeastern School Board on Wednesday evening, to terminate its contract and services with Panorama, a student survey company. The motion passed by a vote of 4-3. Those board members who voted to end the data survey were Dr. Juanita Albright, Ben Orr, Tiffany Pascoe, and Suzanne Thomas.
Fishers One supports the decision made by the Hamilton Southeastern School Board to discontinue the use of Panorama’s services. The Board’s decision was based on what is in the best interest of the students and the community.
The HSE administration was asked many questions concerning the privacy of data associated with the Panorama Survey. Specifically, the Board was troubled by the information they received regarding whether the data gathered by Panorama was tied to individual students and who could access these student IDs or names. The safeguards meant to be in place to guarantee students’ privacy has proven to be inadequate.
“We appreciate the careful consideration and review conducted by the Hamilton Southeastern School Board in making this decision,” said Diane Eaton, Founder of Fishers One. “Fishers One has long advocated for student-centered policies and practices in our local schools. We believe that the termination of the contract with Panorama is a step towards ensuring that student data is gathered in a manner that is safe, effective, and aligned with the values of our community.”
Fishers One trusts that the Board will consider alternative options that more closely align with the core values of our community and serve the best interests of our students. We must protect our students’ privacy and work to attain academic excellence for the school district.
Fishers One
Fishers One is a grassroots community-based organization dedicated to restoring academic excellence in our schools, maintaining Fishers as a great place to live, and cultivating the next generation of community leaders. You can learn more about Fishers One and how to get involved at fishersone.org or at our Facebook page at facebook.com/FishersOne.
What Fishers One conveniently leaves out is that this costs the district $100k because they’ve already paid Panorama for a two-year contract. Additionally, the state requires that districts report data like the one collected in the Panorama survey annually; with the board’s decision, teachers and administrators will have to waste time either creating their own instrument or paying for a new one, both of which take time and resources away from students and education.
This is what modern conservatives do: they blow things up without regard for consequences, make things horrifically inefficient and cumbersome, then decry how nothing government does could ever work, so they can privatize it and use it for profit while keeping everyone’s attention turned to culture-war issues.
“Fishers One has long advocated for student-centered policies and practices in our local schools. We believe that the termination of the contract with Panorama is a step towards ensuring that student data is gathered in a manner that is safe, effective, and aligned with the values of our community.”
Really? By pushing for the terminatio of this contract, Fishers One seems to completely ignore the needs of the students. And what is this “values of our community” stuff? Fishers One pushes the values that they want to see–less diversity, less inclusion, less student led initiatives, less fact based educwtion. Fishers One wants to move us backwards about three to seven decades.
Wouldn’t the more fiscally conservative thing be to let the contract expire and then give more time and resources to replace it for a state improvement plan requirement?. Over 90% of parents did not opt there kids out and if you did not want your students to take the survey-you could opt them out. This board went against the majority of parents and have proven in 2 short months on the board that they can not be trusted. For board members that ran on a platform for fiscal responsibility and transparency-they have shown they are neither. Thanks to Ms. Lang, Ms. Donsbach, and Ms. Parks Reese for voting not to terminate the survey as well as being transparent in explaining reasoning for their votes. The four board members(Mr. Orr, Ms. Thomas, Ms. Pascoe, and Dr. Albright) who voted to terminate the survey did not give reasons at the meeting on 3-8-2022, and when Ms. Thomas was asked to elaborate her motion-she couldn’t explain except for re-reading the prepared statement. Why do board members have prepared scripts stating why they are motioning a certain way when agenda showed information item and not action item. It appears these board members care more about what their financial donors want than what is best overall for the students and the district.
” For board members that ran on a platform for fiscal responsibility and transparency-they have shown they are neither.”
The result of an agenda being more important than the ( apparently false ) promises made in order to get elected.
There always was more to the story than just test scores, but voters believed the rhetoric & as such, here we are …