What More Can You Ask For?

Post by Eric Mason: Eric is the parent of 3 children who attended the Bettendorf Community School District. Eric and his family moved to Georgia this past month.

Educating my children is easily one of the most important things I do as a parent.  So I don’t simply trust anyone to help with that. 

My family and I moved to the Quad Cities from Virginia, although we are originally from New Orleans.  We looked at all of the schools in the area before we settled on Bettendorf High School and the Bettendorf Community School District in general.  Best choice we could have made.  Below are the two things that meant so much to us and confirmed our school choice.

1. Commitment to Excellence.  My daughter came to Bettendorf being fairly advanced in foreign language.  She was finishing an online Spanish III class in 8th Grade and we needed Bettendorf Middle and High to coordinate the transfer.  Both Ms. Kelly and Mr. Casas were enthusiastic about getting things moving, with Ms. Kelly cutting through all of the red tape to make it happen.  My daughter has completed up to Spanish IV and completed Chinese II. 

My older son is a little advanced in math and needed to take classes at the high school while he was an 8th grader.  Mr. Casas was insistent that educating advanced students should not be a problem for the families, but something that the school could work out.  And work it out he did.  He and his team coordinated the scheduling of classes for my son to take at the high school and arranged for a shuttle to take my son to the middle school after his high school classes where done.  My son had A’s in all of his classes that year.

These two examples for me show a commitment to excellence, both in the students and the administrators.  The administration at BHS took their jobs to educate all students seriously and didn’t allow any obstacle to hinder them. 

2. Communication.  BHS offered a plethora of ways to communicate with teachers and administrators: Email, telephone, newsletters, text messages, parent/teacher conferences, Twitter, etc.  Sometimes we would receive messages in multiple formats.  My favorite piece of communication is the Virtual Backpack.  In the Virtual Backpack you get these little tidbits of information on events going on at school and in the Quad Cities community, like camps and concerts and museum exhibits etc.  For someone not from the community this was very useful.  I also enjoyed the parent/teacher conferences. The teachers seemed to know our children’s capabilities and played to them.

I would recommend Bettendorf High School to anyone.  Great principal, great teachers and great students….what more can you ask for?