Our Toronto student survey series

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The third part (of three) of our series on the Toronto school board’s survey data was published this morning.

The project involved a lot of cross-platform collaboration with Global Toronto: I went out with a cameraman twice this week (can I say that being driven around for a story feels kind of decadent, and really easy to get used to?) and also reported off video filed by the TV side.

The series, with the accompanying TV pieces, looks like this:

  • Cyberbullying still rare, Toronto student survey shows Story | Video
  • How safe do Toronto students feel? Depends where they study Story | Video
  • 60% more Toronto students have private tutors – in wealthy areas most of all Story | Video

    • The TDSB’s survey data broken down by school

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    Back in July of last year, we thought it might be useful to be able to work with the data from the Toronto public school board’s student census, an enormous effort that involves more than 100,000 students and their parents. They’re asked a wide range of questions, from sexual orientation to bullying experiences to their parents’ employment status.

    So we filed an FOI request. In the end, the data we were looking for arrived in February, as over 300 .pdf files (one per school) which slowed down our efforts to work with it, to put it mildly.

    Some people, including us, have sometimes been clever and/or lucky in being able to scrape data from .pdfs, but in this case we just resorted to data entry. (I got lots of help from intern Elton Hobson.)

    Today’s story, the first in a series, focuses on what the survey tells us about cyberbullying in relation to other kinds of bullying. There are lots of maps: