Before the Wichita public school district decided to ask for a bond referendum, it wanted to get a reading on how Wichitans felt about the schools and on what it would take to change their tax support.

USD 259 had the ideal resource to go to here at WSU – a public administration faculty member who specializes in what’s called "citizen demand assessment."

The way associate professor Mark Glaser sees it, citizens need to have their voices heard and public policymakers need to be aware of what communities think.

"I’m not a pollster," says Glaser, who has been in the public administration field for more than two decades. "I don’t believe in making decisions by the latest poll. What I try to do is tell how the citizens see the world around them, and then they (policymakers) respond to that either by changing what they are doing or by trying to change how the citizens see the world around them.

"In some cases, the citizens are very accurate in terms of their perceptions of realities. In other cases, they don’t have the information base they need. Citizen behavior is driven by their perceptions. Reality isn’t the driver."

He specializes in how citizens view their community because he calls that "the glue that holds society together." That sense of community determines everything from helping your neighbor’s kid who’s just fallen off his bike in front of your house to paying more taxes, he says.

Community attachment is when citizens are able to put the interests of others above their own, Glaser says.

Americans as a whole are pulling back from community, he says. "What we’re finding is that people are pulling away from all the traditional institutions. They’re pulling back from lots of different things and retreating to self-interests."

That’s happening to some degree in Wichita, but on the whole he’s found Wichitans are pretty pleased with their quality of life.

Over the past three years, he and colleagues in the Center for Urban Studies have surveyed Wichitans, and later just residents of the northeast neighborhood, about a variety of community issues. This spring he undertook the USD 259 survey of 25,000 registered voters.

He’s found plenty of positives, and he’s found some negatives, too, in those surveys.

He was surprised when he discovered 78 percent of the 1,814 Wichitans in the 1997 city survey thought the quality of life in Wichita was good. Fewer people found that to be true when he’d undertaken a similar survey of the Orlando, Fla., community.

He found seven out of 10 people thought Wichita was a safe place to live and that nine out of 10 thought community policing made neighborhoods safer. Six out of 10 people said they often talked to neighbors, and eight out of 10 thought their neighbors would help them if asked.

One example of how such surveys help policymakers is the recent action by the City Council to disband the Citizen Participation Organizations. In that 1997 survey, Glaser found citizens really didn’t understand CPOs and fewer than half the respondents thought they were an effective way to communicate with city government.

With a similar quality of life survey, commissioned by the Urban League, of Wichita’s African-American community, Glaser again found a strong sense of loyalty to their community. Residents of the northeast neighborhood had concerns about economic issues and crime.

In his surveys, Glaser has usually asked questions dealing with race.

"There’s a racial division that is getting deeper, so when it comes to issues surrounding race there’s a huge divide in the way we see things," he says.

In the overall Wichita survey, for instance, he found only 38 percent thought race relations were good. In the Urban League survey, only 25 percent of the 594 respondents thought blacks and whites have equal employment opportunities.

In the school bond survey, he found that nearly 61 percent of the 7,200 respondents felt people of different races get along, and nearly the same number felt students receive the same quality of education regardless of race. Approximately 30 percent of the responding African Americans felt students get the same quality of education regardless of race.

One of the reasons Glaser relishes his research is that it offers a chance to blend teaching, research and public service, in addition to having the ability to improve lives through policy decisions.

"What I do fits so well and blends so naturally," he says.

He’s become quite good and quite in demand at what he does. "We actually turn down two projects for every project we accept. The problem is not finding work. The problem is finding the time to do the work."

He’s currently working on two projects. In Fairfax County, Va., a wealthy county that rubs next to Washington, D.C., he’s assessing how immigrants are adapting and what the county can do to help that adjustment process.

He’s also working with his former boss, Wichita city manager Chris Cherches, in a research project to help the League of Kansas Municipalities in its strategic planning.

Glaser is on his second stint teaching at WSU. He’d been with the university from 1983-1990 and returned in 1994. In between he worked with the city manager’s office, helping the city avert Superfund status when groundwater contamination was found in Wichita’s central business district. He also taught for two years, 1992-94, at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.