I already know our community is proud and supportive of our school system. I would like to share more reasons why to be proud of what the students and staff accomplish every day. Vinton-Shellsburg’s two elementary schools were named to the top 50 elementary schools in Iowa by U.S. News and World Report. Shellsburg’s five grades, Pre-Kindergarten through 4th grade, ranked 50th among Iowa’s 614 elementary schools. Tilford, with grades Kindergarten through 4th grade, ranked #23. Vinton-Shellsburg Middle School was ranked #18 out of 376 middle schools in the state of Iowa. The U.S. News and World Report rankings focused on scores for reading and math and shared other important data points.
Recently, we have received our school performance profile data that compared our Pre-COVID data to our Post-COVID data. This data was compared to all the other area schools in the Grant Wood Area Education Agency and the state. The Vinton-Shellsburg School District improved our ratings in 2 of 4 attendance centers. Three of four attendance centers were rated as “commendable” by the state, with our middle school receiving a “High Performing” designation. This is the first year the district has had all four attendance centers with a rating of commendable or higher. Our strength areas were the amount of proficient students in math and English language arts. We outpaced the state average of proficient students by eight percentage points in English language arts and fourteen percentage points in math. Our largest growth areas come from our conditions of learning, survey information and our four year graduation rate. Given the challenges that the pandemic has presented over the past two years I think these results speak volumes of the resiliency of our students and staff. We should all be very proud of our results and use these results as a platform to build upon going forward.
Finally, at the middle school and the high school level we have so many extracurricular activities going on over the next two months. Please come in and be a part of the action, we would love to see you here supporting our students. If you can’t make it, please remember that we have been broadcasting our high school basketball games online and that is a great way to watch and support our students as well. In fact, if you have a family member that lives out of town or has a difficult time being able to make it into games, please let them know about our YouTube channel “Go Vikes”. Thank you all for your continued support of the Vinton-Shellsburg School District and as always, if you have questions please feel free to send me an email or call at any time. I hope you all have a great February!
Phone: (319) 436-5685 or email: kyle.koeppen@vscsd.org
Take care,
KYLE KOEPPEN
Superintendent
#GoVikes | #VSProud
