WACO named in top 14% performing schools

WAYLAND — WACO schools put in a lot of hard work and received high scores from the Iowa School Performance Profiles.

According to WACO Junior/Senior High School Principal Tim Bartels, the secondary school received a “High Performing” rating of 61.56 and the elementary earned a “Commendable” rating with a 55.74.

According to the Iowa Department of Education, these ratings provide “an overall score and performance category for all Iowa schools across a number of performance measures.”

“Schools receive a score for each indicator, and the scores are combined into an overall score,” the Iowa DOE explains. “Based on the overall score, one of the following ratings is assigned to each school: Exceptional, High-Performing, Commendable, Acceptable, Needs Improvement, and Priority.”

Schools in the High-Performing category for 2023 are a part of the top 13.59% of schools statewide.

WACO Junior Senior High School is among only one of three Southeast Iowa schools to receive the High-Performing rating.

“Last year we were .04 away from getting the high performing rating and we talked about that as a staff and we talked about that as a student body,” Bartels explained. “We talked about competing to try to be that school.”

Bartels saw the staff and students step-up and achieve this goal as they decided “ … that is something that we really want for ourselves and we want to be better than what we were before.”

With high buy-in from staff and students, Bartels said the response from staff when they learned the news was incredible.

“We shared it with the staff and there were applause all around because it’s a lot of work to do this and you can see in the state when you look at how many schools are actually high performing,” Bartels said.

“I was so happy for every single staff member and student who knew that this was a goal and they nailed this thing,” he said.

Bartels feels that WACO was able to push through and gain that higher rating thanks to staff focusing on relationships.

“Teachers in their classrooms are focusing on relationships with kids first, knowing each individual kid and know of how they learn and how they grow and tailoring what they do for them,” he said. “The next thing is, we’ve really focused on growing our standards as a school and teachers have done countless hours of work in trying to align their curriculum to the standards and how they assess kids and that actually means.”

Bartels says teachers have worked really hard in those curriculum areas to try to figure out how to best meet the needs of the kids.

“The other part is the culture and climate,” he continued. “We worked really hard to make this a place where kids actually want to be, where teachers want to teach, where staff want to come, where parents want to send their kids, because everybody is going to be somebody, at least we’re going to work really hard to make that a thing.”

Considering their high-performance profile rankings and the fact that the secondary school has also earned the fifth highest conditions of learning rating for any high school in the state of Iowa, it is no wonder that Bartels says he has seen an increase in open enrollment.

“We have a record number of open enrolled kids,” he said.

Currently, WACO has 130 kids open-enrolled throughout the approximate 500 student district.

Bartels has also seen the impact of the districts hard work as teachers comment that they can’t go out wearing a WACO shirt without someone recognizing the school and making positive comments.

According to Bartels, though, WACO isn’t done yet.

“The staff and students put in countless hours trying to earn this, and lucky for us, there’s another level,” Bartels said. “So, we’ll see what that looks like, but for right now, we’re really just analyzing the things that we currently do to get better. There is no stop. There’s always going to be a desire to compete in there. So, that’s really our next step.”

Right now, though, Bartels can’t wait to hold an assembly and announce the news to the hardworking student body and celebrate this accomplishment as the whole WACO CSD body.

Comments: AnnaMarie.Ward@southeastiowaunion.com