The Governing Board of the Benicia Unified School District will hear a further overview on Benicia Unified School District students’ responses to the Relationships, Effort, Aspirations, Cognitions, Heart (REACH) survey at Thursday’s board meeting.

The REACH survey is considered a supplement to the California Healthy Kids Survey and further examines the relationships between students and teachers and identifies internal assets known to increase achievement. The survey was issued for the first time in the 2015-2016 school year, and Dr. Carolyn Patton— the district’s special services director— presented an overview at the Sept. 1 meeting. Benicia Middle School, Benicia High School and Liberty High School students were polled on the following five categories:

*Relationships: Do teachers believe in their students?

*Effort: How students view their own intelligence influences the effort they put into their school work.

*Aspirations: Do students have positive visions of their futures and set and work toward their goals?

*Cognition: How well do students manage and think about their own thinking?

*Heart: Do teachers provide students with the spark that would allow them to exert effort in and out of school?

Patton noted that the results were mixed, and the areas in which students rated themselves were the strongest whereas the areas where students rated their relationships with their teachers were the lowest. Particularly, 60 percent of students indicated that none of their teachers connected learning to fun activities and 29 percent said teachers did not try to find out what they were interested in.

Patton will be diving deeper into the data at Thursday’s school board meeting and actions currently being implemented at the three schools.

In other business, Chief Business Official Tim Rahill will report on a workshop he attended on Gov. Jerry Brown’s January budget, and the board will consider ratifying the tentative agreement between the district and the California School Employees Association, Chapter 1096.

The board will meet at 7 p.m., Thursday, in the Benicia Unified School District Board Room at the district building on 350 East K Street. There will be an earlier closed session at 6 p.m.

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