Marshalltown — Marshalltown Community School District staff on Monday reviewed Bobcat Ready results for the Class of 2025 and described curriculum, reporting and staffing changes they say contributed to a drop in students meeting the district’s college-and-career readiness designation.

School leaders told the Board of Education that 33.33% of 2025 seniors earned the Bobcat Ready designation; 35.92% were classified as college ready and 69.25% as career ready. Staff emphasized that a change in the state’s definition of what qualifies as “work‑based learning” reduced the number of students who could be counted in the career‑readiness metric.

Why it matters: Bobcat Ready is a locally adopted set of academic and career indicators that the district reports on the state report card and uses to signal postsecondary preparedness. Board members and staff said the designation is used for student recognition and may be expanded for local scholarship alignment and graduation regalia to increase student motivation.

Justin Boliver, Marshall High School principal, and Adam Van Arkel, the high school college and career readiness counselor, presented the program and the data during the meeting. Boliver said the district has run Bobcat Ready since 2019 and explained the two-part requirement: students must meet college‑ready criteria (for example, a 2.75 GPA plus an academic indicator or a testing benchmark) and career‑ready criteria (an identified career interest plus three career indicators).

Van Arkel walked board members through the year’s results and the district’s analysis. He said 41% of seniors had a GPA of 2.75 or higher; of that group, 71% earned the Bobcat Ready designation. He identified turnover in the college-and-career transition counselor position and a recent change in the state’s work‑based learning definition as major drivers of the dip.

“Our target changed pretty drastically,” Van Arkel said of the state definition. “Students have to actually be doing some sort of learning in the classroom, then they have to be going to a job site or partnering with a business to actually do some sort of work and then coming back and reflecting.”

Staff listed programs that still qualify under the updated state guidance, including IJAG participation, the CNA course, Foods 3 with work at the Bobcat Cafe, academy courses at Marshalltown Community College and certain early childhood classes. Van Arkel said counselors will meet with MHS teachers during professional learning community time to expand qualifying opportunities and that the district will streamline volunteer-hour collection through its Xello platform.

Middle‑school principals also described a parallel “high‑school ready” designation for Miller Middle School, which blends academic and behavioral indicators. Middle‑school leaders said roughly 76–77% of middle‑grade students met the behavioral indicators while academic indicators trailed.

Board members asked about the overlap between career‑ and college‑ready students and about students who transfer into the district late in the year; Van Arkel said both factors affected counts. Superintendent Theron Schutte and other board members urged continued focus on stable staffing for the CCR role and on expanding local work‑based opportunities that meet state reporting rules.

Looking ahead, staff proposed several actions to raise Bobcat Ready rates: expanding outreach and instruction on the designation at the start of the school year, awarding a Bobcat Ready cord for graduation, increasing in‑school checks during homeroom, aligning local scholarships to Bobcat Ready criteria, and reexamining the framework with community partners.

The board received the report; no formal action was taken Monday.