You’ve probably heard the quotes, “What gets measured gets managed,” or “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it,” or even, “We measure what we value.” Central to each of these quotes is the premise that capturing data is the foundation for examining growth, impact, and understanding how the decisions we make change outcomes. If we care about outcomes, we have to measure them.
Data as a Compass
The Kentucky Department of Education recently released its 2025-2026 accountability and assessment data. The data highlights clear challenges and opportunities to celebrate growth. It can guide instructional practices, budgetary choices, and policy decisions, serving as a compass for where to target support. This is one example of how what we measure gets managed.
While measuring academic outcomes is critical, the environments children experience, both inside and outside of school, profoundly shape their success. Given this relationship, we should be measuring those various factors and environments.
Assessing Environments: School Climate and Safety
For example, the Quality of School Climate and Safety (QSCS) Survey measures school environment and provides insight to student perspectives on the climate of their school, whether they have access to safe, trusting adults, and even perceptions of how a school handles student behavior.
- HB 257 from the 2026 Regular Session removed this survey requirement from the state’s accountability system, meaning it will no longer be administered alongside the state assessments.
- As part of this bill, schools have the option to add additional local indicators that reflect priorities of the local community.
Missing Valuable Student Perspective
The QSCS survey served as an annual data collection point for schools on their environments, highlighting bright spots, areas of growth, and providing direction for school climate interventions. Statewide, this survey also served as an avenue for understanding student perspectives on climate and safety in Kentucky public schools.
Although districts still have the option to use these surveys, Kentucky’s active consent rules could make it harder for schools to locally administer them and as a state, we will now be losing access to valuable student perspective data.
- For example, according to the latest QSCS, during the 2025-2026 school year, 26% of elementary school students and 37% of middle school students strongly disagreed or disagreed with the statement that, “Adults from my school stay calm when dealing with bad behavior.”
- Additionally, 45% of high school students strongly disagreed or disagreed with the statement, “Internet bullying is NOT a problem for students from my school”.
As a state, we might look at these data points and consider additional resources for school staff in the area of behavior management as well as support to prevent cyberbullying among students.
Data Collection Challenges
As of 2023, KRS 158.191 requires active consent for student well-being questionnaires, assessments, or health screenings surveys, meaning that parents must opt their child in to participate in each survey or assessment rather than opting them out. This practice of requiring active consent has dramatically reduced response rates in recent years to critical surveys such as the Kentucky Incentives for Prevention (KIP), the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), and even mental health screeners that schools once relied upon to identify and make decisions around interventions that support academic achievement.
A Closer Look at the Challenge: KIP Survey
The KIP survey anonymously tracks Kentucky middle and high schoolers’ substance use, gambling, mental health, and access to community programming. The most recent KIP survey only collected approximately 21,000 responses, compared to approximately 130,000 in 2018. The limited responses made the data unusable for tracking trends or comparing data from previous years. Several school districts received no local data at all due to low return rate on consent forms.
“The KIP survey specifically is one of the most effective ways to get local data on substance use and mental health. The majority of programs NKY ASAP has worked with rely on KIP for grant applications, planning programming, and identifying what their focus areas should be. Several school systems in our region and throughout the state did not have enough respondents to the 2024 survey to receive a report. Reduced participation limits our ability to assess community needs, identify emerging concerns, measure changes over time, and effectively target prevention resources. It also makes comparisons between schools and communities more difficult when participation rates vary significantly.”
– Courtney New, NKY ASAP Director
Let’s Measure What We Value
Kentucky should promote robust data collection to understand and respond to student well-being trends. High-quality data on youth is foundational for schools, youth-serving organizations, and policymakers to design programming and policy that meets the needs of students.
Restoring opt-out policies for prevention surveys that are used to monitor student physical and mental well-being, substance use, risky behaviors, and environmental factors ensures that:
- Decision-makers, schools, and communities have the complete, reliable data they need to keep kids safe
- Parents can make informed decisions about if their child will participate in data collection
- Schools have flexibility to administer the survey in a way that respects parents’ rights without burdening school personnel
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