Iowa Quality Center Executive Director Gary Nesteby, UCSD Superintendent Steve Bass, UCSD School Board President Graham Giles, UCSD Director of Quality and Continual Improvement Denise Wood, and Governor Terry Branstad.

On March 30, 2017, Governor Terry Branstad, Iowa Recognition for Performance Excellence (IRPE) Executive Council and the Iowa Quality Center honored the Urbandale Community School District (UCSD) with the prestigious Silver Leadership Level Award at the Governor’s Recognition of Performance Excellence Celebration and Conference held at the Meadows Conference Center in Altoona. The IRPE is Iowa’s National Baldrige-based process designed to recognize role-model organizations in education, manufacturing, nonprofit, healthcare and business. UCSD has earned its Silver Leadership Level status for two consecutive years, and is the only Iowa school district to be recognized at the Silver Leadership Level. Other award recipients include Firestone Agricultural Solutions, Iowa Donor Network and Businessolver.

A highlight of the conference was having Urbandale High School (UHS) students share presentations about their recent experience learning and implementing critical problem-solving and continual improvement tools in order to determine the best approach for solving an existing business challenge at Bridgestone and Businessolver. Many attendees commented on both the breadth and depth of the presentations and how professional, thorough, and remarkable the UHS students were who delivered the presentations.

Seven years ago, UCSD began the evidence-based journey of implementing a systems approach for continual improvement in order to transform education by moving away from old paradigms that have outgrown their effectiveness and moving toward those that create joy in learning, teaching, and leading. By adhering to the rigorous standards established by the Baldrige framework, standards that the most successful organizations across the nation use to achieve high performance, Urbandale is able to more fully align goals throughout the entire district with one clear aim: to systemically advance student achievement.

As Urbandale continues to collect, monitor, and assess data throughout the system, we continue to see results that indicate our systems approach to processes and practices are helping to improve our entire district. One such area of growth and achievement is the graduation rate of UHS students. While the average graduation rate across the state is 91.3%, UHS far surpasses this rate at 98%, and is also far below the average drop-out rate of 2.8% with the UHS drop-out rate at 0.2%. While there are many more quantitative and qualitative data points that help to form the complete picture of how a school district is performing, the graduation rate and drop-out rate are two important indicators that the district’s growth and development are continuing to move in the right direction.