Iowa’s largest school district plans an educational overhaul in response to years of declining enrollment and budget cuts.
A proposal for Des Moines Public Schools would make full-day pre-school more accessible and offer interest-specific schools to cater toward students’ chosen careers.
Associate Superintendent Matt Smith says the district also intends to move sixth grade back to elementary in order to retain more students in the transition to middle school.
“This is about making Des Moines Public Schools a premier destination of choice,” Smith says. “We need to get in that game. We need to make sure we are providing the best educational experiences for our students, day in, day out.”
The district has nearly 34,000 students. As part of the effort to offer more opportunities for students to explore careers of interest, Smith says the district itself will split into three regions to better connect neighborhoods with their schools.
“To do nothing is to communicate to our 5,000 employees to just work harder,” Smith says. “They cannot work any harder. They’re doing everything that they can within the structures that were built a hundred years ago.”
The final plan is meant to be rolled out over a decade. In recent years, Des Moines has steadily lost enrollment, as around two-thousand students transfer out of the district each year.
Smith says by 2030, the goal is to gain students through open enrollment, but to do that, the system needs to modernize. Smith says the plans will include closing or repurposing some buildings.
(By Lucia Cheng, Iowa Public Radio)