Putting Students First: The Race for Polk County Public Schools to Develop Better Prepared Students From a Younger Age
By RJ Walters
Photography by Noelle Gardiner and Provided by PCPS
Inthe late 1860s kids piled into one-room schoolhouses when strawberry harvesting season was over.
Today, kids enjoy sprawling modern facilities with technological innovations and decades of research and data integrated into the educational experience, and educators are strategically focused on how to help a student achieve their dreams—which could include one day being the CEO of a global produce company whose profit margins rely heavily on the strawberry harvesting season.
The Polk County School District formed in 1869 when Polk County was home to just over 3,000 residents, and now with an exploding population that is more than 250 times that the challenges and purposes aren’t as starkly different as you would imagine.
At the core, our public schools continue to wrestle with the best way to prepare young men and women to work when they come of age, while allowing them a safe space to develop socially, emotionally, physically and intellectually.
With more than 120 schools and more than 14,000 employees, it’s all hands and hearts on deck as staff implement new technologies, learn new instructional methods and are bombarded with more numbers and spreadsheets than ever before.
In 2023-24, the district fell just one percentage point short of earning a ‘B’ grade at the state level for the first time since 2019, causing Superintendent Fred Heid to celebrate the progress, but reiterate the hard work that is just beginning to achieve the outcomes he and his team know are possible.
The cadence of his speech quickens when he talks about wins—which include more students graduating with associate level college degrees and industry certifications, improved teacher retention, more impactful collaboration with local businesses and higher state test scores in every subject district wide. And his words become more calculated and flow a little slower when he hones in on areas of focus that the district simply has to create better outcomes in. To Heid, who is entering his fourth year as leader of one of the 30 largest school districts in America, two things he insists on getting and staying better at that encompass the district’s overarching goals are: high school graduation rates and acceleration points.
The district’s high school graduation rate has been 78 percent the past two years, and data from last school year has not been released by the state, in part because of summer graduations. Heid said he is confident the number will finally be above 80 percent, but that’s just a launch point for where he expects to go with unified efforts and new initiatives in place that fill identified gaps based on data and student experiences. The statewide graduation rate was 88 percent during the 2022-23 school year.
One of the ways the district is making inroads is through its plethora of career and college readiness offerings in high schools—and even middle schools—progress that is indicated in the acceleration points schools earn, which continues to improve each school year.
The state rewards acceleration points for things such as industry certifications, international baccalaureate performance, advanced placement course performance, etc. Heid said the better the district does at providing the resources and roadmaps in middle school, the better the district’s high school test scores—and ultimately graduation rates—should become.
“We’re eliminating barriers, so if a child is ready for algebra in seventh grade, why wait? Let’s give them the opportunity and then they can earn high school credit and take geometry as an eighth grader,” Heid said.
Numbers and data tell a story of a district striving to compete at a higher level than ever before. Sometimes the data lags behind the effort or new challenges arise, but Heid believes he has the teachers and staff needed to accomplish this grand mission.
“I think our [academic progress] is a testament to our amazing teachers, our administrators and our support staff., I make a habit of telling everybody in our organization that every single job is equally important—there is no job that’s more important than another,” he says. “A student’s academic day starts with a bus driver, it starts with food and nutrition services with breakfast, and those relationships are increasingly important. Recently, one of our community partners stood up and acknowledged the fact that if it hadn’t been for custodians and the food service workers, her son would not have felt as connected to school. It’s the relationships that matter.”
“We’re eliminating barriers, so if a child is ready for algebra in seventh grade, why wait? Let’s give them the opportunity and then they can earn high school credit and take geometry as an eighth grader.”
– PCPS Superintendent Fred Heid
