Last week the Iowa Department of Education released results from the Iowa School Report Card, and our schools once again received high marks. For starters, I am proud to announce to you that Hudson Elementary School (K-6) received a 'Commendable' rating, improving their overall score for the third year in a row. This is clearly an indication that our goal of continuous improvement in our school is paying off.
This rating further demonstrates that what we have been doing in our schools is working! The professional development plans that have been implemented in the elementary that target early reading intervention are effective, and the work that we are doing to ensure alignment of our instruction to the Iowa Core Academic Standards is paying huge dividends. Consider this: In the spring of 2017, 70% of early readers in Iowa met benchmark, posting a 2.90% average gain when analyzing FAST data. In our comparability group of 16 schools, 73.29% of readers met benchmark with an average gain of .98%. And Hudson Schools? 77.20% at benchmark with an average gain of 7.8%! Folks, these kind of results don't happen by accident. They are due to the hard work and commitment of our faculty, staff, students, and families. Now make no mistake, we still have work to do, but it is apparent that we are headed in the right direction!
Not to be outdone, our secondary school (7-12) continues it's trend as one of the highest performing high school's in the state, rated in the top 9% of high school's statewide. One of the most impressive, yet often taken for granted metrics in our data is the high school graduation rate, which hovers between 99-100% consistently. You are probably also aware, as recently reported by the Des Moines Register, that Iowa leads the nation in graduation rate at 91.3%, which makes our results even more spectacular! But, ensuring our students cross the finish line only tells part of the story. In our district, 81.1% of all graduates are enrolled in a post-secondary institution within one year of graduation, compared to 70.5% of graduates in the Central Rivers Area Education Agency and 70.8% of graduates statewide. Of course if that isn't impressive, how about this: only 11.5% of Hudson graduates take a remediation course upon post-secondary enrollment; this compared to 29.1% of graduates agency wide and 21.7% statewide. Again, we have work to do--but these are incredibly impressive statistics!
The Iowa Department of Education states in their release that the Iowa School Report Card was launched in 2015 as part of the education reform legislation known as House File 215 which was signed into law in 2013. The Iowa School Report card assigns Iowa public schools a rating based on one of six categories: Exceptional, High Performing, Commendable, Acceptable, Needs Improvement, and Priority. Several measures used in determining the rating are bases on statewide assessment results. You can read the full press release here. You can access the Iowa School Report card by following this link to see the ratings of other schools around the state.
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