To make room for the fifth-grade classes at the neighborhood elementary schools, Superintendent Dr. Jesse Ulrich proposed recommissioning the former Arey Elementary School — which is currently used as the district’s Central Administration Building — back into a school. This time it would be used to house an early childhood center for preschool, pre-K, transitional kindergarten and kindergarten classes.

The first phase of construction projects related to the reconfiguring will begin in the spring with renovations to the former Hy-Vee building. The Hy-Vee building, which has since been renamed the Annex Building, will be the new central administrative offices and maintenance facility. Those renovations are anticipated to be completed sometime in the summer.

Once that phase is complete, the district will continue with renovating the Arey building, with tentative plans to open it as the early childhood center in the fall of 2021.

The administration’s top accomplishment this past year has been securing the leadership team, Ulrich said.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Aaron Davidson, Fort Dodge Middle School principal, talks with Michael Burnell and two other eighth-graders in the cafeteria before school starts on the first day of classes.

“We’ve been working on building that leadership team’s capacity to serve our students, staff and our families,” he said. “We have reviewed our systems and our organization and we’ve made the recommendations and approvals on the fifth-grade transition. That’s a huge part of that in regards to figuring out what organizational structure is best for kids and then aligning our system best to meet those needs.”

Ulrich added that the district’s elementary schools are seeing a lot of success and growth.

“When a couple of kindergarten classrooms at Butler are over 90 percent proficient, that isn’t the story that most people hear,” he said. “We’re seeing tremendous growth from our staff with our students.”

Dr. Kirsten Doebel, district director of secondary education, said that much of that success and growth comes from the administrative and leadership teams working to create systems that ensure consistency in educating and that good practices spread across the district.

Partnerships with individuals, businesses and other groups in the community have made a “tremendous” impact on the district, the superintendent said.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Jerry Ellendson’s iJAG classes collected gently used professional clothing items for students to wear to job interviews. Ellendson, center, is pictured with students Samahi Henderson, Sierra Summers, Caitlyn Lewis and Seth Ramirez.

The district is seeing positive results from its partnership with Athletics For Education and Success, he said. Following a pilot program with AFES involved at Butler Elementary School and Fort Dodge Middle School, administrators are seeing a decline in discipline referrals.

“Office referrals, dealing with physical aggression are down half from the beginning of the year,” Ulrich said. “And referrals in general are down about a third.”

The BRIDGES mentoring program, facilitated by Corey Moody at Fort Dodge Senior High, pairs students at all levels with members of the community for a little extra guidance. Ulrich sees the success of this program as another indicator of the district’s strong relationship with the community.

“We’re really proud of the community support and the business partnerships that we have been able to develop here in the past 18 months,” he said. “We have a supportive community and a supportive growth alliance that wants this school to be successful and are willing to give of their time and resources.”

FDSH adds iJAG program

New this year at Fort Dodge Senior High is the iJAG program.

Iowa/Illinois Jobs for America’s Graduates, or iJAG, is a statewide comprehensive drop-out prevention and school-to-work transition program established in 1999. This is the first year of the iJAG program at FDSH, and there are 70 other high schools across the state of Iowa with an iJAG program.

“The class is getting kids on a career path and figuring out what they like,” said Jerry Ellendson, iJAG teacher at FDSH. “We do a lot of job-ready type stuff like resumes, taxes and a lot of stuff that you’ll need for life.”

Even halfway through the school year, the results of this program are clear.

“For me, when I went and visited with them, it’s very evident that they have a newfound confidence in their abilities that they didn’t see in themselves before,” Ulrich said. “We have kids who are stepping into leadership positions within that organization that they wouldn’t have thought about doing before. We have kids stepping up and developing marketing plans and planning events and figuring out how to better our community.”

For the 2019-2020 school year, the district’s enrollment has increased slightly, with an additional nine students, but Ulrich said with a district of roughly 3,700 students, that’s more of a steady and stable enrollment trend.

In recent years, the FDCSD has also implemented new curriculum aimed at better aligning with state standards for math and literacy.

“That curriculum that we have adopted, we have done research and picked the most highly rated standards-aligned curriculum that exists out there for our language arts program and our math, and I think that we’re starting to see some of the results of that hard work, because it’s been hard work,” Doebel said. “We hear anecdotal things from our teachers all the time — ‘I trust the curriculum and my kids do things I never imagined they’d be able to do, the quality of work, the products they produce.'”

When the state replaced the Iowa Assessments tests with the Iowa Statewide Assessments of Student Progress tests this past year, the FDCSD overall scores dropped, Doebel said.

“We knew that moving from the old Iowa Assessment to the new ISASP assessment, the entire state kind of braced itself for a drop in proficiency because it’s aligned to standards and the other test wasn’t,” she said. “And we knew it would be a more rigorous assessment.”

However, Doebel said, the Fort Dodge schools’ scores dropped less than the average drop across the state.

“What I think we’re beginning to see is glimmers of all of the hard work we’ve been putting in starting to show up in our student achievement data,” she said.

For the fall semester of 2019, 228 Senior High students enrolled in 422 dual-credit classes to earn 1,073 college credits, valued at more than $200,000 in college credit tuition — all at no cost to the high school students.

“We continue to celebrate the credits for the dual enrollment, the number of courses our kiddos are taking, the financial and economic impact that has on our families, because for every one of those classes that they can complete while they’re here at Senior High, hopefully, when they go on, they don’t have to retake those courses and that saves them money and time,” Ulrich said.

While there are no concrete plans in the works, Ulrich said he would like to see the addition of an agriculture education program, but for now the district doesn’t have the funding to start such a program.

“When you think of our region and the number of manufacturing companies that are ag-related, whether that is agriculture production, or ag science or ag business, it’s pretty widespread,” Ulrich said. “Nearly everything, somehow or some way, is driven by the agriculture economy. For our kids to be able to have an opportunity to have a better experience at that, I think that would be something I would want to take a look at.”

Going forward, the district does have some infrastructure plans on the horizon.

This summer, the artificial turf at Dodger Stadium will be replaced, Ulrich said.

The district is also looking at more long-term projects.

“There are some updates that we need to do in the Cooper building, as well as the Feelhaver building,” Ulrich said. “Those buildings are nearly original, so we need to do some updating to those buildings. We need to take a look at Dodger Stadium. That was a WPA project, so most of that stuff is original. We need to start tackling that.”

The district will work on updates to the Riverside building, which will house the CARES and PRIDE program following the fifth-grade transition. CARES and PRIDE serves students with significant mental health issues or other educational needs.

“We have a full slate of stuff over the next seven or eight years of continued projects happening,” Ulrich said.

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