About

Greenwood School rests on a beautiful 4.8 acres of land. The original Beaux Arts building was built in 1901, designed by Proudfit. In 1928, an addition was added, including a gym and an auditorium. A second addition was added in 1960’s, a third in 1970’s.  It is the oldest operating school building in Des Moines Public Schools.  Thanks to the generous donations of our school families and community partners, we were able to add a jog/walk track to our green space in 2022, which is open to the public on the weekends and after 5:30pm during the school week.

At Greenwood Elementary in Des Moines, Iowa, we pride ourselves in creating a positive and nurturing learning environment for our students and families.  Our efforts focus around three main core values:  a supportive school community, high academic achievement, and developing social emotional learners.

CORE VALUE 1-Supportive School Community

We strive to ensure students are celebrated as individuals and their voices are heard and lifted.   We welcome our students to school each day with a warm greeting as they enter the building, and work to ensure they have at least one trusted adult who connects with them on a positive and personal level.  One way we honor student voice is by providing opportunities for them to suggest and participate in weekly enrichment clubs during the school day based on their interests and passions.  These clubs provide an opportunity for them to engage with peers throughout the school, demonstrate leadership, explore their hobbies and interests, and work collaboratively with each other.  As an added bonus, they also get to engage with building staff outside of their classroom to build connections and promote positive engagement.

CORE VALUE 2-High Academic Achievement

We understand each one of our students enters our building with a variety of strengths, growth areas, cultures, and background experiences.  Our goal is to build on their strengths and develop their areas of growth utilizing the resources that are available to us and high-quality instructional strategies, while creating a space for students to goal set around their growth areas and achievement.  Our instructional teams analyze student data regularly to guide instruction and inform decision making and next steps for student support.  We follow our district’s recommendations for high-quality curriculum implementation and are continuing to embed deeper level questioning techniques to elicit more elaborative student responses.  Two of our main focal points are to close the achievement gap of our underserved students and decrease the number of students who are chronically absent.

CORE VALUE 3-Develop Social Emotional Learners

We believe it is important to support our students in understanding their feelings and perspectives, as well as those around them.  Through morning meetings, classroom counseling, and individualized social skills, we aim to help our students develop the skills and access tools to promote positive self-regulation.  We believe it’s important to validate students’ feelings and support them as they navigate peer conflict, unexpected emotions, lack of resources, stress, etc.  When working through peer conflict, we approach each situation from a lens of restorative practices: providing space for students to reflect on their actions in the situation, what they might do differently, and how it may have impacted others, before working together to come to a solution that repairs the relationships for those involved and collaboratively develop an action plan as they move forward.    At Greenwood, we’ve created a therapeutic space for students to access School Based Orchard Place Therapy, Mosaic therapy services, and small group/individualized social skill support.