December 8, 2025
by Nancy Van Milligen, President & CEO, Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque
This is the third in a series of blog posts chronicling Community Foundation of Dubuque’s work with the GRAD Partnership, cross-posted from the Foundation’s website.
Two Tables, One Message
In my first blog post about the GRAD Partnership, I wrote about two tables: the boardroom table, where we discuss frameworks and data, and my kitchen table, where I watch my grandsons struggle with school. At the Community Foundation’s Rural Teacher Summit on August 7 at Innovate 120 in Maquoketa, I saw those two tables merge.
Around the summit tables sat teachers who live at both intersections every day. They understand the work required to guide students toward proficiency in academic standards and benchmarks, as well as the challenges that arise when a student disengages, their attendance declines, or they suddenly appear indifferent. Like me, they also recognize these struggles on a personal level, witnessing their own children face learning difficulties and obstacles within the educational environment.
Those 80 teachers at the summit also know that their students are showing them something important. Today’s students are more diverse in their learning needs, more open about mental health, and more vocal about wanting education that connects to their lives. This is progress. Students who can articulate what they need are students we can help.
Our teachers are already rising to meet this moment with creativity and care. The opportunity is to support them with systems that make this work sustainable and scalable, so every student in every classroom benefits from the relationships and responsiveness our best teachers already provide.
Relationships Are Strategic
The Summit featured an array of speakers and workshop leaders who explored topics from brain health to experiential learning. They also went deeper than simply sharing strategies and opportunities. They dug into what it means to be a teacher in a small town and the unique ways in which rural communities are strong and resilient. Aaron Thomas, principal and head basketball coach at Aplington-Parkersburg High School, was the Summit’s keynote speaker, and while he talked about how educators get to know their students and each other in small communities, he also shared the intentional structures his school built to make meaningful relationships unavoidable.
For example, teachers eat lunch in the cafeteria, not the teachers’ lounge. “It’s hard to complain about students when they’re sitting a table away,” he explained. Between every bell, teachers stand in hallways, greeting each student by name.
This is GRAD Partnership’s first essential element of student success systems, Strong, Supportive Relationships, in action. Four types of relationships drive student success: adult-to-student, student-to-student, adult-to-adult and school-to-family. When these relationships are strong, students feel belonging, validation and acceptance, conditions that directly predict graduation.
Thomas made this visceral. He shared the story of the 2008 tornado that devastated Parkersburg, destroying the high school where his father was head football coach and athletic director. Despite the trauma, community connection sustained them.
“If we don’t make a positive impact on our students and give them a positive experience, who is going to?” he asked.
Adults Need Support, Too
During the Summit, Tara Madden, of Talent Development Secondary – the technical assistance partner supporting our GRAD Partnership project – took the conversation deeper by focusing on adult-to-adult relationships in schools, one of the four types of relationships that administrators often overlook.
Teacher efficacy, that powerful belief that “I can make a difference,” grows through connection, not isolation. Relationships form and deepen when staff share challenges alongside celebrations, design their own professional learning, and structures encourage self-care.
Madden and her team shared practical strategies, including staff kick-off events that celebrate and acknowledge, weekly bulletins that highlight best practices, and structures that make asking for support feel safe. This is how you keep teachers in rural communities—not with pizza parties, but with systems that make them feel seen, and supported.
Data That Actually Helps
Student success system’s second core element is Holistic, Real-Time, Actionable Data. Not compliance data. Not data nobody checks. Data that teachers can use to help students right now.
Schools implementing student success systems are seeing substantial progress reducing chronic absenteeism and course failure rates, the strongest predictors of graduation and postsecondary success.
Student success systems combine predictive data like early warning indicators with insights from students, families and teachers. When this is done throughout the year at student, grade, and school levels, it enables root cause analyses and strategic action planning. As a result, it reveals not just who needs support but also why and what to do about it.
Burnout Is Real
Summit speaker Jessica Goltz, founder of Seva Health Center for Well Being, brought candid honesty about pressures educators face in rural communities. They wear multiple hats. They see their students everywhere. Work-life lines blur.
Goltz shared her own burnout journey, offering connection, not just strategies. Her message validated what teachers know: You can’t pour from an empty cup.
This directly aligns with student success systems’ third element, Strategic Improvement Actions. Student success systems use regular data assessments, including teacher well-being, to develop action that’s student-centered, locally adapted and involves students, teachers and communities.
It’s not about adding more. It’s about teams of adults working collectively with frameworks that enable smart problem-solving.
The Mindset That Changes Everything
The fourth element is Student-Centered Mindsets, a shared understanding of why student success systems matter.
When Thomas, the keynote speaker, said, “Build something big here,” he articulated this mindset. Rural schools aren’t deficient suburban schools. They’re unique community assets with strengths that flourish when systems support them.
As Josie Manternach, Community Foundation program officer and former Aplington-Parkersburg teacher, told attendees: “We really focus on retention of teachers in rural areas, because we know how important your rural schools are to our communities. Without all of you, we wouldn’t have our rural schools.”
What Does This Mean for You?
Most schools already have at least some form of student success team or early warning system in place. The GRAD Partnership doesn’t aim to replace them. Instead, it provides an evidence-based framework to support school teams and integrate and strengthen existing efforts.
The Community Foundation serves as backbone organization for the GRAD Partnership in the seven-county Dubuque, Iowa, region. We’re part of a national network led by Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center, working with schools nationwide to implement sustainable student success systems. Central to this work is supporting local collaborations to create and customize these systems to local needs.
For teachers: Your instincts about relationships, belonging and seeing students as whole people are correct. The GRAD Partnership gives you system, structure and support to do this work without burning out. It gives you evidence to advocate for what you know works.
For administrators: This isn’t soft stuff. This is strategy that drives sustainable results at the local level. Schools implementing student success systems reduce absenteeism and course failures. They retain teachers. They create conditions for students and adults to thrive.
The framework builds local expertise rather than consultant dependence. It adapts to your context. It works with what you have, not against it.
Build Something Big
Those 80 teachers at the Summit gave up time during their summer to gather in Maquoketa because they believe in rural communities. They believe in their students. They believe their work matters.
The Community Foundation believes it too. That’s why we’re bringing the GRAD Partnership to schools across our region.
Bigger isn’t always better. But building something big in small places – one relationship, one student, one teacher at a time – is how you transform communities.