At the beginning of the 2026-27 school year, the Bridge Learning Center opened at Keystone AEA in Elkader, providing a therapeutic educational setting for special education students from 14 partner school districts.
Micah Gearhart, Central Community School District superintendent and executive director of the Bridge Learning Center, said the program developed from recognizing a need across area communities. For individual school districts, providing this type of specialized support can be difficult, particularly when only a small number of students need it.
Challenges with developing these programs within each of the 14 districts would include finding qualified staff, covering the cost of those services and finding adequate space within existing school buildings. By working together through a consortium, the districts are able to share those resources and provide a more robust therapeutic program.
The 14 participating districts are Central, MFL MarMac, Turkey Valley, New Hampton, West Delaware, Allamakee, Eastern Allamakee, Starmont, West Central, Oelwein, Sumner-Fredericksburg, Decorah, Postville and North Fayette Valley.
The Bridge serves K-12 special education students whose IEP teams determine they would benefit from a smaller, therapeutic educational setting. While students continue to work toward the same academic standards as their peers, the program provides more individualized academic, behavioral and therapeutic support.
A major focus of the program is preparing students to eventually return to their resident school districts. Staff begin thinking about that transition as soon as a student enters the Bridge, identifying the skills and supports they will need to successfully return.
“We’re a place for a time, not a place for a student,” Gearhart said. The goal is to help students build the skillsets they need to return successfully to their home districts.
Amy Holst, Bridge Learning Center program administrator, said the opportunity to create the program at Keystone AEA was an especially good fit. Space on site that will become classrooms and a multipurpose area was previously used as offices for AEA staff and specialists. As work has increasingly shifted out of those individual offices, the space became available for a new use.
“The space will include a middle school-high school wing, an elementary wing, therapeutic room and the whole middle section will be the multipurpose room,” Holst explained. “We’ll have the opportunity then to be able to keep the kids separate, K-6 and then 7-12, but yet the multipurpose room will be able to be accessed from both sides.”
“We’ll have an office assistant in our lobby area as well as lockers for the students. They’ll have their own entrance where the students will get dropped off and we’ll be here to greet the kids every morning,” she added.
While renovations are being completed, the Bridge is operating out of two temporary classroom spaces elsewhere on the Keystone AEA campus.
The school began serving eight students with a staff of three teachers and two paras, along with support from an AEA social worker. Once the classroom spaces are completed and additional staff is added, they will be able to serve up to 30 students.
Holst’s role as program administrator is to oversee the program and help staff use student data to make decisions. She previously worked as an AEA counselor, regional administrator and program administrator, with a focus in special education procedures.
Keystone AEA Chief Administrator Annette Hyde also brings a background in special education to help support the program.
Explaining how the level of specialized care is a major benefit and what that means for students, Holst said the Bridge differs from a traditional classroom by allowing teachers to provide more small-group and one-on-one work and be more intentional with students’ transitions and routines, while still holding them to the same academic standards and material they would be working on in their home district.
Each day, students are transported to the Bridge Learning Center by their home district. Throughout their time at the Bridge, there will be regular checkpoints and ongoing meetings to communicate student progress, keep the home district involved and develop plans for an eventual return. The partnership will also allow strategies and support that are successful at the Bridge to be carried over to the student’s home school.
“For each student we’re looking at, how do we partner with the district to make sure that the support that we put in place here can be replicated back at the resident district, so that when we’re moving a student back, they’re going to be successful?” Holst said.
Student data will be reviewed every two weeks to monitor progress and identify the specific skills they still need to build. How long a student attends the Bridge will depend on their individual goals, progress and circumstances.
As students progress toward that return, they may begin spending part of the school day in their home district while continuing to receive support at the Bridge. The transition can gradually increase from a single class or portion of the day until the student is ready to return full time.
The Bridge Learning Center’s name reflects the partnerships at the center of the program, while also having a connection to its location. Holst said the name was initially inspired in part by the Keystone Bridge, which many students cross on their way to the learning center, but quickly took on a larger meaning.
“It really stuck because it just had so much meaning,” Gearhart said. “Since our goal is to be a place for a time, or a bridge for students.”
The location at Keystone AEA also creates opportunities for those connections to extend beyond the program itself. Central Community School District, which serves as the consortium’s fiscal agent, is located less than a mile away, allowing Bridge staff to work closely with Gearhart and other Central staff. Central will also provide meals for students, access to its school nurse and serve as an additional educational resource. Gearhart gave the example of a student interested in welding potentially being able to access that opportunity at Central, even if their home district is farther away.
The Keystone AEA campus itself offers additional resources. Bridge staff will have access to the AEA’s existing collection of curriculum, educational materials, and indoor and outdoor activity equipment. The campus also provides outdoor space that Holst sees as another extension of the therapeutic environment.
“We have a ton of wilderness,” Holst said, highlighting the presence of foxes, turkeys and deer that are regularly seen around the property. “It also is a very therapeutic space up here. We’ve got wilderness, it’s quiet in the back, so just being able to teach kids mindfulness and being able to appreciate nature. There’s a lot of opportunity to do that here.”
Holst said those opportunities could eventually include gardening, planting flowers and other hands-on activities. The program also hopes to build partnerships throughout the Elkader community to give students opportunities outside the classroom, including working with local businesses and exploring potential job experiences.
“There’s just a lot of opportunity in our community for kids to have some of those post-secondary opportunities beyond just sitting in a classroom all day, which is what we want,” Holst said. “We want them to be prepared and able to go be productive members of society—being strong people, family members, neighbors, workers and everything that comes after graduation.”
The benefits of the consortium are also intended to extend beyond the students who attend the Bridge. By combining resources, the 14 districts can provide specialized training for Bridge staff while also opening those professional learning opportunities to special education staff at other schools throughout the consortium.
One example is Teach to Heal, a training focused on supporting students’ mental health, trauma and behavioral needs that is being provided to Bridge staff and made available to staff from each of the partner districts. Bridge staff are also receiving training in CPI, an evidence-based approach to crisis prevention and de-escalation, and Ukeru, a trauma-informed approach focused on de-escalation and reducing the use of restraints.
“Nobody’s getting trained in silos,” Gearhart said. “It’s kind of nice for them to be able to replicate some of that stuff back at their own building as well.”
Gearhart said the long-term vision includes creating a “teaching school,” where educators from consortium districts can visit the Bridge to observe strategies in practice and take what they learn back to their own classrooms.
“If a school district, one of our consortium members, has a teacher that says, ‘Boy, I heard that the Bridge is using this strategy,’ they would be able to come and see that strategy being used in person and bring that back to their own district,” Gearhart said.
The familiarity with the same approaches will also help when a student transitions from the Bridge back to their home district, allowing these strategies and philosophies used at the Bridge to continue after they return.
Before the Bridge, providing that level of support could mean sending students significant distances from their home districts, including to programs in Waverly, Cedar Rapids and even out of state.
Creating a closer option began with a task force formed to explore what a shared program could look like. Districts were invited to participate, and the idea was brought before individual school boards, with 14 ultimately committing to the consortium. A process is also in place for districts that did not initially join to become part of the consortium in the future.
From there, the districts and Keystone AEA relied on legal counsel to develop the agreements necessary to operate the program.
Those included a 28E agreement formally establishing the consortium, a lease agreement, an agreement establishing Central as the host and fiscal agent and an agreement for Keystone AEA to provide instructional services. The initial commitment is for 10 years, with an option for a five-year extension and annual extensions after that.
Gearhart said the longer commitment provides districts with predictability when planning both programming and school finances, where budgets are often based on enrollment and state funding decisions made well in advance.
Costs associated with the Bridge are shared in several ways depending on the expense. The lease and estimated utility costs are divided equally among all 14 districts, while general program expenses, including curriculum, supplies, equipment and staff training, are prorated based on each district’s enrollment. Costs directly associated with serving students at the Bridge are billed on a per diem basis to the districts whose students attend.
The program will also see larger upfront expenses as classrooms are equipped with items such as desks, curriculum and Chromebooks. Unlike recurring expenses, many of those purchases will remain with the Bridge and can continue to serve future students.
As enrollment grows, administrators expect the per-student cost of operating the program to decrease as expenses are spread among more students. Gearhart said that balance is part of what makes the consortium approach possible, districts can provide a level of staffing and specialized support that would be difficult to sustain individually for only one or two students.
With the Bridge model being new, Gearhart said there has also been excitement from others across the state who are eager to see the program succeed and hopeful the consortium could provide a model for better serving students in their own communities.
