March 29, 2024

What is the Heartland AEA?

Agency supports school districts in dozens of ways, including discounted printing

What does the Heartland Area Education Agency do?

After reading over a brochure or the website of the AEA, a better question might be about what the agency doesn’t do. From discounted bulk printing to crunching assessment data to helping locate specialists, the Heartland AEA provides many support resources to local school districts.

Among other services,Heartland AEA provides support in the areas of curriculum, instruction and assessment testing and data, program evaluation, bulk purchasing of printing and copying services, food and beverages and instructional materials; English Language Learning issues, Title III programming, instructional technology, early literacy implementation and early childhood development support.

There’s more: professional development and training, budgeting and finance, regulations and guidance, occupational and physical therapy, school psychology and social work special education consultation and speech-language pathology.

Heartland is joined by the Northwest, Prairie Lake, Green Hills, Keystone, Grant Wood, Mississippi Bend, Great Prairie and “267” area education agencies in providing the multitude of support services to Iowa schools. Founded in 1975 as Area Education Agency No. 11, Heartland serves a swath of central Iowa that stretches from reaches as far west as Carroll and as far southwest as Winterset.

Chris Pierson, a Heartland AEA Region 8 director, handles the agency’s support efforts for the Baxter, Colfax-Mingo, Lynnville-Sully, Newton and PCM school districts, as well as Newton Christian and Sully Christian. Region 8 also includes Southeast Polk, North Polk and Bondurant-Farrar.

“One purpose of ours is to help promote equity,” Pierson said. “Not simply for all students to have the same opportunities to learn, but for districts to have the same resources.”

Working with districts as rural as Baxter and as suburban as Southeast Polk is one of Pierson’s many challenges within Region 8.

Covering all that distance between districts can be tough. When a face-to-face meeting or a delivery in an AEA van aren’t needed, Pierson and others make use of video conferencing and other means of bridging the hundreds of miles of roads in the region when possible.

That’s why the agency is such a big part of what schools do: Iowa schools don’t need to have, say, a school psychiatrist on staff, or contract independently with one, if Heartland or another AEA has one who can service the district.

The agency paid rent to the Newton Community School District as it used some rooms in the Emerson Hough building, which will be one of the district’s four K-4 elementary schools in August. The Newton office is moving soon to the second floor of the main Newton DMACC building, where it will use part of the space currently used by the Newton Development Corporation.

Pierson said it’s important for parents, educators and others to know an AEA is not an enforcement arm of the department of education. It’s a support system to help teachers and other educators meet the needs of students.

“I don’t know anyone who wakes up thinking ‘I want to screw up at work today,’” Pierson said. “We all want great things for kids. The key is to try and find ways to educate as many children as possible using inclusive core instruction, to keep students caught up so they can stay in core instruction and to consistently improve the entire delivery of education.”

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com