By Samantha Hernandez, Des Moines Register
Des Moines Public Schools officials are celebrating a 5% increase in the schools’ 2025 graduation rates.
The twist? Officials don’t know what led to the bump, which followed several years of graduation rates holding steady at around 72%.
Officials plan to review at least five years of budgets, curriculum and programs — including ones related to credit recovery — in an attempt to pinpoint what led to graduation rates rising from roughly 71% in 2024 to more than 76% for the class of 2025, Interim Superintendent Matt Smith told the Des Moines Register.
“What will be important for us as a district is to answer the ‘Why?’ of that with a great deal of specificity,” Smith said. “And that requires us to go back in time. It’s not just going back to what happened last year … we need to go back and say, ‘Alright, what did we spend time and money and energy on four years ago, five years ago, in this cohort of students that we’re seeing this pay off?'”
Another potential factor for the improved graduation rates could be the district’s push to meet students and their families’ needs outside the classroom, he said.
“Whether it’s credit recovery or whether it’s just life circumstances that we need to intervene with to help make sure that kids have stable housing or food security,” Smith said, “all of that culminates into an ecosystem of love, care, support and focus on students still meeting the standards within those classes and those credit bearing courses.”
The Des Moines rates still lag behind the statewide average. Statewide, graduation rates climbed from 88.3% in 2024 to 88.8% for the class of 2025, according to the numbers the Iowa Department of Education released April 6.
Roosevelt High School’s more than 89% graduation rate is the only DMPS school which exceeded the state average.
Data guides school officials
Data plays a major role in helping high school staff figure out how to help students, officials said.
At East High School, 72.4% of East High School’s seniors graduated in 2025 — up 6% from the previous year.
School officials try to use students’ data to get ahead of issues that may arise, said Principal Jill Versteeg.
“While we have a really strong uptick in our data, we still have work to do, and our team will continue their diligence in our work with students and families to make even more gains in the coming years,” Versteeg said.
Another part of raising East’s rates was working with students and families to unlearn bad habits formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, including how students perceive the importance of school, Versteeg said.
The school’s counseling team makes sure families understand what it will take for their students to graduate, she said. Additionally, the school hosts senior meetings and workshops to help teens prepare for life after school.
Versteeg also credits low staff turnover with helping to provide stability.
“This allows us to really partner with families,” she said. “They know the people they are coming in to meet with when situations arise, and it helps problem solving attendance concerns and supporting their student success.”
In spring 2024, the district launched its “Every Day Matters” campaign to curb chronic absenteeism. At the time about 39% of its students were chronically absent.
That number dropped to 21% by the end of the 2024-25 school year.
Across the district, Hoover High School saw its rate hold steady at almost 73%, Lincoln saw its graduation rate go from 74% to 79% and North saw almost 71% of its graduates cross the stage in 2025, up from 67% in 2024.
Virtual Campus’ graduation rates dropped from almost 55% in 2023 to 45% in 2024. In 2025, it rebounded 14 percentage points.
Part of that jump could be because of Virtual Campus having a smaller group of students, Smith said. Ninety-one of the school’s 153 seniors graduated in 2025, according to state data.
As with all the schools, officials will be looking at the data to see if a change to the program’s curriculum or how it is being run aided in the uptick, Smith said.
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