Starting in the 2025-26 school year, Head of School Jennifer Ciccarelli has decided to issue an annual culture and community survey for all Marlborough faculty and staff.
Ciccarelli works with a senior team of Marlborough administration that discusses how to enhance culture within the Marlborough faculty and staff. This year, they have partnered with Authentic Connections, the same platform that creates the annual High Achieving School Survey (HASS) for students, to implement a survey for faculty and staff that centers on their experience working at Marlborough.
Ciccarelli noted how it is impossible to control the outside world, but that cultivating a health and supportive work culute can help mitigate external stress.
“There is a lot going on in the world that feels pretty heavy. It’s been going on for quite a while, but we’ve been having conversations about wanting to support the faculty and staff,” Ciccarelli said. “There is only so much we can do about the external world. What we can do is think about the culture and community we build at Marlborough.”
The survey included questions about varying aspects of faculty and staff’s work lives, such as what is working well, pressures at work and what can be altered to better support the faculty and staff.
“One of the things that people always tell us when they come to Marlborough is how special this community is, and it is,” Ciccarelli said. “And we really value and love it. We want to do everything we can to preserve it and enhance it. One of the ways this community is so special is the faculty and staff. We think of ways to support and honor them on so many levels, and we always want to get better at that.”
The qualitative data from the survey will be analyzed by Authentic Connections to identify Marlborough-specific trends, which will be compared to other high schools across the country to identify where Marlborough’s strengths and weaknesses lie.
“We are developing our muscle of seeking data to improve things,” Ciccarelli said. “I like that as a way to approach this work.”
Additionally, Authentic Connections compares data from different years to identify if Marlborough is improving based on new interventions. This will allow the administration and senior team that focuses on faculty and staff culture to create new goals based on real-time feedback.
History and Social Sciences Instructor Tom Millar noted the importance of the survey both for students and teachers.
“It’s always a good thing that every school is working on finding out,” Millar said. “Just like teachers try to find out where their students are, [the school is] finding out where their faculty are.”
