Located in the scenic river town of Burlington, Iowa, the Burlington Community School District offers a small-town atmosphere with big-school opportunities that empower our Grayhounds to unleash their passion, curiosity, talent and potential.
We serve approximately 3,200 preschool through 12th-grade students across nine campuses, including Corse Early Childhood Center, which offers childcare, 3-year-old preschool and free 4-year-old preschool. CECC also serves as a lab school for Southeastern Community College’s Early Childhood Development program.
BCSD is the largest district within the surrounding five counties, affording students a wide variety of course options, including talented and gifted programming, 19 AP and Honors classes, 12 career and technical education pathways, and, in partnership with Southeastern Community College, 28 concurrent enrollment courses.
At BCSD, we believe it’s important for students to have well-rounded experiences both in and outside the classroom, which is why we offer a diverse range of extracurricular activities, with more than 20 student clubs, 12 music ensembles available as early as fourth grade, and more than two dozen sports teams, including football, swimming, girls wrestling and e-sports.
We also have some of the smallest class sizes in the area, with an average of 19 students per classroom across our four K-4 elementary buildings, where students receive quality core, music, art, P.E., and STEM instruction.
Each K-12 building offers leadership opportunities to students in the form of student voice groups, whose members work closely with building administrators and staff to enrich their school’s culture.
Aldo Leopold Intermediate School, which serves our fifth- and sixth-graders, and Edward Stone Middle School, which serves seventh- and eighth-graders, were built in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Each is named after notable Burlington natives: Aldo Leopold is considered the father of wildlife conservation, and the late Edward Stone was an internationally known physicist who directed the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Stone graduated from Burlington Junior College in 1956.
Burlington High School, the oldest attendance center in the district, is in the process of undergoing a $32 million renovation project that includes a new weight room, new science wing, modernized classrooms and additional security features.
For families looking for a less traditional and more flexible approach to public education, there’s VIBE Virtual Learning Program, which serves K-12 students and offers remote and hybrid learning.
BCSD also is home to Club M, which matches high school mentors with K-4 mentees. These students meet weekly at Burlington High School, where they do activities based on shared interests. Club M is the only certified student mentoring program in the state of Iowa.
Several of our Club M mentors also help with the district’s PiECES After School Program, which provides free, quality afterschool programming until 6 p.m. each full school day and is available to all K-6 students.
The Burlington Community School District’s vision is to have a profoundly positive impact on each student’s adult quality of life brought about by the students’ individual and collective educational experience, and that’s what we strive to do every day.
