The staff of the Marshalltown Community School District (MCSD) care deeply for the strong culture of the district, and it is shown in survey results from HUMANEx.
HUMANEx CEO Brad Black went through the results of the confidential, anonymous survey with the school board at the regular Monday meeting. The survey is intended to measure culture. There is a high rate of participation at 80 percent across the MCSD because participants see the value. The survey has been conducted every year since 2020, and the lowest participation rate was 79 percent in 2021, and the highest was 87 in 2023.
Rogers Elementary had the highest rate of participation with 98 percent, and lowest was a tie between Lenihan Intermediate and Building & Grounds at 73 percent.
“People realize that they bring culture everyday, themselves,” Black said. “. . . There’s ‘I’ questions. There’s ‘we’ questions. There’s ‘who I report to’ and the overall district. So, everyone’s got a job to do if you’re going to create a great culture.”
MCSD staff rated 15 different dimensions, and Black said if the overall score for a dimension is above a 4, it is considered a strength for the district. The four top-scoring dimensions were pride, engage-inspire, quality and satisfaction. Each of the 15 dimensions also improved since the 2024 survey.
“We can look at that and say, ‘Wow. Strong culture,’” he said. “In a typical district or a typical organization, we typically see five of these 15 that are strength-level. [You] obviously have many more than five that are strength-level.
Pride, with a score of 4.29, was the number one driver amongst MCSD staff, Black said, and is directly correlated to engagement. The MCSD results show a strong correlation between staff and student engagement and learning, which he said is terrific to see.
“When you have high pride, you have high engagement,” he said. “. . . The more you drive pride, real pride that you have earned about the impact you are having, the standards you have, the successes you are having, you drive engagement.”
Out of the 15 dimensions, only four were below a 4 – performance planning, support-equip, communication and recognition, the latter which scored the lowest of 3.86.
“It’s usually no higher than a 3.4,” Black said. “It’s a heavy, hard one to lift up.”
Besides rating dimensions, staff also answered 92 questions, and the top one was “I am fully engaged in the work that I do” with a score of 4.59.
“Those are the billboard items,” Black said. “You want to get that out on the highway and advertise that to the community. Do you know that the people that are with your kids today feel this way? Wow. These are things to be proud of. When you’re talking about the level of participation with as many people as we’re talking about, to average a 4.59 on Likert scale of 1 to 5, [that’s] hard to do and terrific to have.”
The lowest scoring question was “I have received meaningful recognition in the past 10 days” with a 3.28. Black said that does not mean the intention to recognize staff for a job well done is not there, but rather that there is still some work to do to give that recognition staff members want. He said the MCSD building that scored highest in the recognition could be a teacher for the other facilities.
“We break down the dimensions in the lower items and ask the best ‘Can you teach us what you’re doing?’” Black said. “It’s not about the address or the kids in the building. It’s about the culture that’s being built.”
School board member Zach Wahl said he would like to know what the district is doing for recognition. He felt a lot is done in recognizing employees.
“I would be interested to know what could be better,” Wahl said.
Black gave an example and referred to a previous meeting presentation made by Rogers Elementary staff. He told Wahl when leaders of a school building present to the board about progress and success, the entire staff feels proud, which can then impact other buildings.
“Somebody who is in third, fourth, fifth place asks ‘How do we go? How do we get there? When are we going to go?’” Black said.
He pointed out that when it came to “elite” cultures, Rogers and Woodbury elementary schools had the highest 2025 scores of at least 80 percent, which Black said is considered at the “championship level.”
“You can feel that when you walk in the building,” he said. “It’s like there’s something in the air. It feels different when, from the employees, they’re reporting how they feel. Two are 80-plus and pull up the district overall.”
At various times throughout the presentation, Black opened it up for questions. Wahl said it was the fourth year he had seen survey results, and added every year there was improvement.
“I hope you feel proud when you look at those scores,” Black said. “. . . It’s hard to do. It’s like you’re a decathlete and you’re improving in every part of it. It’s hard to do and it’s impressive, because that means a lot of people are lifting it up.”
He added that MCSD is highlighted in his book, “Talent, Culture & Teams: The Ex-Factors of Excellence.”
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Contact Lana Bradstream
at 641-753-6611 ext. 210 or
lbradstream@timesrepublican.com.