The Office of Oakland’s Parks and Recreation (OPR) contracted with Gibson & Associates (G&A) from 2001-2003 to examine the quality of services provided at the 24 recreation centers and 7 pools throughout Oakland.
Initially G&A met with the department director and management staff to define the parameters of the evaluation. In addition to gauging the experience of the 13,709 customers, OPR was interested in focusing the evaluation to examine the existing staffing patterns and facility use, recruitment and use of volunteers and collaborative relationships that could expand services to OPR customers and/or improve facilities without substantially increasing operational costs.
To address these issues G&A developed and administered a bi-annual survey of client experience, capturing the feedback of over a thousand customers every six months. Since the majority of OPR customers are children ages 0-12 whose feedback cannot reliably be captured in a written survey, using youth researchers who could better identify with the children, we also conducted focus groups with children at selected sites.
G&A researchers interviewed all the Recreation Center Directors and the Director of the Aquatics Program to discern the best ways to increase programming and the bolster the capacity of the OPR staff and facilities. Toward that end we documented the staffing and use patterns of all facilities, identifying those that were underutilized and the reasons for this.
In order to address the service quality issues, G&A examined the results of the survey data from all the centers and, together with the OPR staff, identified eight centers for more intensive evaluation. This is an example of the way OPR used evaluation data to inform program management oversight. G&A staff then conducted structured observations of these eight recreation centers, rating them on a range of criteria of quality services (e.g., safety, maintenance, accessibility, quality and intensity of programming and interactions between staff and customers).
The bi-annual evaluation reports to OPR occasioned the management team’s meeting to discuss service redirection based on the evaluation findings and recommendations, thus helping them to become a “learning community.” As a result of this work with OPR, the staff instituted summer camp programs in facilities that were underutilized specifically during the summer and developed greater capacity (e.g., deployed additional staff and added programming choices) at underutilized centers year-round. The Director began work with staff at underperforming centers to increase the quality of programs offered there and OPR performed “spot training” for staff to more consistently collect enrollment data, thereby more accurately capturing the numbers of customers served.
In addition to these structural reforms resulting from the evaluation, OPR has used research findings to stimulate discussion in their management team meetings, sharing effective practices developed at one center with the other centers’ staff. Creating this kind of ongoing reflection and dialogue focused on local best practices was a key goal of the evaluation and has led to ongoing program improvement efforts.
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