BUTLER TWP — Butler School District officials have decided on what information they will seek to review the district’s closing and consolidation of schools.

The after-action review committee, which was formed in December, is studying the effects of the consolidation, which closed five of the 11 elementary schools. Center Avenue, which was closed, reopened as an alternative and special needs school.

The other four schools, Broad Street, Meridian, Oakland and Clearfield, remain closed.

On Tuesday, the committee finalized how the consolidation’s impact will be measured, meaning the committee is right on schedule, said committee Chairman Jennifer Cummings.

The data to be used by the committee include: new staff numbers, class size, technology services data, attendance records, discipline data, building size and capacity information, the post-consolidation budget compared to the projected savings, student grades for the first two 9-week periods, lists of unused rooms, student participation in extracurricular activities, actual bus run times, bus-specific discipline data and bus capacities.

Administration officials will gather that data, said Superintendent Dale Lumley.

The committee also hopes to develop a survey for teachers and parents to give subjective measures of the consolidation’s effects, Cummings said.

The committee will hire an independent company to help write the survey so as to avoid wording it in a way that would lead to biased responses.

“You can introduce bias with how you word it,” Cummings said.

School board member Neil Convery said, “I’m very afraid that people will consider that we’re just looking for a certain answer and think we’d look at opening a certain school.”

Vice chairman Al Vavro said a concern is the conciseness of the survey because people are not likely to complete a survey that takes a significant amount of time.

Cummings also was concerned with how the survey could reach all populations of the school district, even if that means having it distributed online and taken home by students.

While the survey discussion focused primarily on receiving feedback from teachers and parents, Mary Wolf, assistant superintendent for elementary education, said that students should be included.

“We’re not asking students, and I think we’re missing that piece,” Wolf said.

The committee also discussed the possibility of including community members who are not parents in the survey, but they may not have the same input as a person involved directly with the school, Vavro said.

School board member Bill Halle said, “The school is a certain box in the community that people don’t look at unless we’re talking about raising taxes.”

Convery said, “The whole community funds this district. They are a part of this district.”

The survey would look at qualitative data rather than numbers, including topics like: staff collaboration, employee job satisfaction, parent involvement, socio-economic integration, overcrowding at different buildings, the safety of students and transportation times.

Campos Inc. of Pittsburgh was discussed as a possible company to write the survey. It charges $200 per hour with an estimated 10 hours needed to create a draft survey, Lumley said.

“The most important thing to me is having a well-crafted survey,” Lumley said.

Any decision to spend money would need to be approved by the school board in January. Lumley anticipates the committee could have a draft survey to review by the end of January.

The committee’s next meeting is at 4:30 p.m. Jan. 26 at the Harriger Educational Services Center, 110 Campus Lane.

Cummings said the administration will present its data to the committee at that time.