The new Central Administration Offices, located at the former Hy-Vee building at 109 N. 25th St., was a $2.6 million project that was completed in early fall. The district’s central offices had been housed in the former Arey Elementary School, 104 S. 17th St., since the school was decommissioned in 1990.

In the fall of 2019, Superintendent Jesse Ulrich announced his plans to the district’s Board of Education to transition the fifth grade back to the neighborhood elementary schools and move the district’s kindergartners into one building, along with transitional kindergarten and preschool.

“We wanted to have a greater focus on our early childhood learners to make sure that all of those teachers are together, receiving professional development, looking for the same things so that when students are finishing up kindergarten and transitioning to those neighborhood elementaries they have a great foundational knowledge of literacy and math instruction,” he said.

Through this plan, the district was able to give new life to two old buildings and reinvest millions of dollars into Fort Dodge through the use of local contractors and architects.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
With 440 fewer students this term, the halls at Fort Dodge Senior High aren’t as crowded during passing times. Parents of about 441 FDSH students have chosen to keep their children home this term, utilizing the district’s at-home learning option.

Once the renovation of the new Central Office Building was complete and the district administration was able to move into that facility, work on the former building was able to get started.

The project was designed by Allers Associates Architects, of Fort Dodge, and Jensen Builders Ltd., of Fort Dodge, won the contract for the project for $5,964,000. Construction began in early October.

“It’s going to be a really unique building,” Ulrich said. “It’s going to be one of our largest elementaries that we have. It will serve about 450 preschool through kindergarten students.”

The Arey building project is scheduled to be complete in June, in time for the start of the 2021-2022 school year.

At the start of the 2021-2022 school year, the district’s fifth-graders will stay in their neighborhood elementary schools rather than advancing up to middle school — the final phase of this large endeavor.

“It is our opinion that it is more academically age-appropriate for fifth-graders to be in the elementary setting,” Ulrich said. “We feel like they’re not quite the age to be in a full-blown middle school.”

With curriculum changes because of the Iowa CORE standards, the district’s elementary curriculum is aligned for kindergarten through fifth grade, which was another motivator behind this move.

The preschool, pre-kindergarten and transitional kindergarten programs are currently located at Riverside Early Learning Center, 733 F St. After those programs are relocated, that school will house the district’s CARES and PRIDE programs for students with significant mental health issues.

New curriculum

Over the summer, the Board of Education approved the adoption of new science curricula for the entire district. The program will largely be from free, open-source curriculum developers, saving the district hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbooks that need to be updated every few years.

All of the material aligns with the start of Iowa’s New Generation Science Standards.

At the elementary level, the schools now use science curriculum from K-5 Assist.

“It is a curriculum that I think is going to be really easy for our teachers to use,” Kristin Hatton, a fourth-grade teacher at Duncombe Elementary School, told The Messenger in May. “It uses many of the same protocols and procedures that we use in our language arts program, so both teachers and students will see that there is kind of crossover and connection between our curricula.”

The program is student-focused, with the students’ questions driving the lessons. The students will build on these lessons throughout the year and throughout the rest of their education, Hatton said.

The students at Fort Dodge Middle School are learning from the OpenSciEd curriculum.

John Newman, an eighth-grade science teacher, said the move to a different curriculum was a necessary one.

“When Iowa first adopted the NGSS, it became pretty evident that we can’t continue to teach the way that we’ve always taught, where it was very much teacher-centered and you relied on the teacher to tell you what to do that day, to a much more student-centered way where kids are working like scientists and figuring out the information through discovery,” he said.

Through the OpenSciEd curriculum, Newman and other science teachers present a “phenomenon” to the class — like a car playing loud music causing windows on nearby buildings to shake — and have them discuss what they think caused the phenomenon, and go from there.

“The kids are leading the conversation; I’m just listening,” Newman said. “The students are really driving the learning.”

The students at Fort Dodge Senior High are working with a few different science programs, depending on the course they’re taking.

Senior High science teacher Lauren Winter teaches ninth-grade integrated science, chemistry and upper-level physics.

“We’re doing a kind of mixed bag of things because at the high school level, there’s not really one curriculum developer that works for all of our courses,” Winter said.

For her ninth-graders, she works with Concord Consortium Interactions, an online curriculum. Other classes, like biology, chemistry and physics, may use NextGen Storylines or Inquiry Hub.

The Concord Consortium curriculum gives students a “guiding question” that they need to answer, Winter said.

“Our first unit, the question is, ‘Why do clothes stick together when they come out of the dryer?” she said. “So that question is the foundation we build on throughout the first unit and we try to learn things to answer that question at the end.”

The units build on each other and students get to learn in a more hands-on way, she said. Through these curricula, students are using skills that scientists actually use, rather than just memorizing facts and equations.

PPEL extended

In an election in early September, voters in the Fort Dodge district voted to extend a tax that pays for school buses, computers and building repairs.

The voters extended the physical plant and equipment levy, or PPEL, for 10 years by a margin of 71.35 percent to 28.65 percent, with 752 voting yes and 302 voting no.

During the same election, voters approved a new revenue purpose statement, which outlines how the school district will spend its share of the revenue from the statewide 1-cent sales tax for schools, with 80.22 percent approving and 19.78 percent opposing. On that measure, 868 people voted yes and 214 people voted no.

School Board President Stu Cochrane said having both measures approved by voters was critical.

“Having those two items in place is just critical to our infrastructure,” he said. “Without that, I don’t know what we would do.”

He said he was pleased that both items were approved by the voters by big margins. That, he said, shows that the public supports what the district is doing.

The PPEL vote did not increase taxes, just renewed and extended the existing tax for 10 years. It is a property tax of $1.34 per $1,000 of taxable valuation and has been in place since 2013.

It is added onto the 33 cents per $1,000 of taxable value PPEL that the school board levies on its own authority without a public vote, so the total PPEL levy is $1.67 per $1,000 of taxable value.

For the owner of a home valued at $100,000, the PPEL would cost $91.97 a year.

The money generated from the levy is used to pay for things like new school buses, the computers issued to students and building upkeep, among other necessary district expenses.

The state’s 1-cent sales tax for schools is called Secure an Advanced Vision for Education, or SAVE.

The district receives about $3.7 million a year from that tax. That money is used to pay off bond debt incurred for big projects, such as the construction of the Fort Dodge Middle School.

The revenue purpose statement approved by voters in September includes the payment of bond debt as one of the uses of the money. Other listed uses include acquiring technology, building schools, remodeling and implementing energy conservation measures.