Former Clear Creek Elementary principal Brandon Borseth announced at last Tuesday’s school board meeting that Clear Creek Elementary had been named the Drake University’s Robert D. and Billie Ray Center CHARACTER COUNTS! 2024 School of Character recipient.
In the last academic year, Clear Creek has been dedicated to making positive changes and showing the community that they care.
“One of the assignments we gave teachers was once a week they were going to make a positive phone call home to a member of their class, and got some amazing feedback from parents,” Borseth said. “There was one staff member who was mad at us because they didn’t want to call and they came to talk to me. The first parent they called, the mother broke down crying on the other end because she had never heard from the school that her child was doing well. And they were new to our district this year and had five years of experience in different school systems. Those things make a big impact.”
Clear Creek also put a focus on making sure kids are in school.
“Last year we had 92% on track attendance. This year we jumped to 96%,” former assistant principal Brittany Murilto said in the meeting. “Brandon and I did a lot of home visits this year, built a lot of relationships with families, working on building plans and trying to help break down some barriers on how they’re getting to school. And we’ve definitely seen a lot of success with that.”
If you were at Clear Creek between 7 and 7:15 a.m., you would hear the radio go off.
“We had instructions for several different bus drivers [that] we want to know immediately if a kid was on the bus or not,” Borseth said. “And in a couple of cases, we actually had a secondary bus lined up if that first one said ’nope, don’t have them,’ that one was able to make a quick swing by that house because it was along a similar route.”
Even with having more kids in the building at a time, the school was also able to decrease office referrals. In the 2022-23 school year, Clear Creek had 216 office referrals, with 25% more than one office referral. They lowered that number to 150 for 2023-24, with only 6% more than one referral.
“We prioritized character, we had more positive office referrals than ever before,” Borseth said. “You make that phone call in the middle of the day, it’s super fun. The kids want you to pretend they’re in trouble and then say ‘no, actually they got sent up because they’ve been working hard, they would show a good example. Your teacher felt so strongly about this that they wanted us to reach out to you.’”
Clear Creek shared more of those than ever before this school year.
“We have a shout-out wall for different codes of character,” Borseth said. “We’ve more shout-outs go up on that wall recognizing student behavior.”
All of these things lead to them being named 2024 School of Character from Drake University. This year’s award recipients will be featured in a one-hour Iowa Character Awards prime-time special that will air in the summer or fall of 2024. Dates for which have not yet been announced.
According to Borseth, a banquet for the School of Character is planned to be held in August.
