2021
Get your badge
Award Winners

NBRS Badge for Lewis Central Senior High School

Lewis Central Senior High School - Council Bluffs, IA

Parade of Excellence

Parade of Excellence

Lewis Central High School is a comprehensive high school in the Lewis Central Community School District in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Through a strong sense of collective efficacy, our staff has worked extremely hard to help every student to be successful by leading with relationships and never being afraid of the conjunction "and" versus an "or" approach to school improvement.

Under the leadership of Dr. Joel Beyenhof, LCHS has focused on the three R's = Relationships, Resilience, and Results. Within this approach staff and students are encouraged and supported in being comfortable with being uncomfortable to improve student achievement. It is this community approach to cultivating resilience that has resulted in a supportive culture that tackles challenges collectively and has resulted in achieving excellence.

This nine year journey has included several key ingredients grounded in research and best practices, referred to as School Soup by the LCHS staff. This recipe for school improvement leads with relationships, or the gravy of the soup, and includes professional learning (meat), instructional vision (potatoes), MTSS (celery), staff leadership (chefs), formative assessment (lattle), and much more. This soup of school improvement results in a stew in which relationships are infused into every ingredient of our work.

This collective work has resulted in a steady growth in student achievement and graduation rates from 83.6% in 2011 to 97.8% in 2020 and ranking as one of the highest rated high schools in the state of Iowa based upon the Iowa School Performance Profile.

2021 Awardee

Lewis Central Senior High School

3504 Harry Langdon Boulevard
Council Bluffs, IA, 51503-8639

(712) 366-8360

Principal at time of Nomination:
Dr. Joel Beyenhof

Lewis Central Community School District

Urban or large central city

School Website

School Facebook

School Social Media

School Twitter

Mission

Lewis Central High School - A Community of Excellence!

Student Demographics

  • Asian: 1%
  • Black/African American: 2%
  • Hispanic: 10%
  • White: 83%
  • Two or more races: 4%
  • Application