On August 25th, the entire high school student body was sent an email with a mandatory ‘FCD Survey’. Now I, along with a large majority of students, had no idea what this actually was, which made me kind of nervous.

Once we saw the questions, which were centered around drug and alcohol usage as well as its effects, we were even more suspicious. A lot of us believed that this self-titled ‘anonymous’ survey was actually a conspiracy by the administration, with the sole function to catch students who had ‘misbehaved’ and to punish them accordingly.

Now it turns out that the ISB administration is not out to get us, but that this survey actually came from the “Freedom from Chemical Dependency”, which is an outside organization. As they explain on their website, fcd.org, “the FCD travels to school and gives students and adults the knowledge, understanding and skills they need to make intelligent, healthy choices about alcohol, tobacco and other drug use.”

High School Dean of Students Mr. Andy Vaughan said that the FCD “comes to every grade level, specifically grade 9’s and has a seminar with the students. They try to target our needs, and they alone run their seminars. They then base their program around our needs as a school. We [ISB admin] don’t get any of the results.”

A main issue a lot of students had with the survey was the idea that it was ‘anonymous’. Some students did not believe that the survey results were completely anonymous and lied in their responses so that they would not get in trouble with the administration.

An anonymous source stated that she “doubted the anonymity of the survey, so [she] was not completely honest with my answers. [She] did not want to get in trouble for [her] responses.” When this point was brought up to Mr. Vaughan, he responded that the “ISB staff never actually see the results. Students still do not think the survey is anonymous, and we don’t know how to get that idea out of their minds.”

Now this all sounds very reasonable, yet some students are still wary of the survey. This is probably because we were not told what the FCD was. The fact that there was little introduction to the survey yet we were expected to honestly answer a lot of personal questions made a lot of the students feel uncomfortable. We were unaware of where this survey came from, where the results are going, and what was going to happen with our results.

There would have been a lot less panic within the student body if we had been told what the survey was about. However whether or not these survey results are going to change the situation at our school, one message is necessary to keep in mind whenever filling out anonymous surveys. As High School Principal Philip Bradley said, “It is not important who said what, we just want patterns.”

Hanna W