On Tuesday, a ceremony was held at Liberty Elementary School to celebrate the fact that the district now offers a full K-12 International Baccalaureate continuum.

“The Ogden School District is now the first and only public school district in the state of Utah offering all four IB programs,” Ryan Edel, Ogden School District IB specialist, announced to the crowd. “This provides an IB pathway for our students, beginning at Liberty in kindergarten and ending at Ogden High School at graduation.”

“IB is considered the gold standard for career and college readiness, with over 5,900 schools in more than 160 countries,” he added. “The IB authorization process is a rigorous training of professional development, system development, change and reflection.”

IB is an international program that encourages “personal development and academic achievement (by) challenging students to think critically, to ask the right questions and think across disciplines,” according to ibo.org. Students can earn college credit based on their test scores.

Liberty Elementary’s authorization to run the Primary Years Program was granted in April 2024. Mount Ogden Junior High offers the Middle Years Program (authorized October 2024) and Ogden High School offers both the Diploma Program (authorized in 2012) and Career Program (authorized in 2020).

“The process to do this took each school about three years to become authorized to be an IB World School,” Edel told the gathered media after Tuesday’s program. “It’s a rigorous process that requires a lot of professional development. It requires a lot of learning. Our teachers had to rewrite units and were continually working on lesson plans and collaborating with one another. The objective is really to prepare our students to live in our modern world and be successful.”

He said the the programs help build up the skills needed for students to advance in an ever-changing world.

“It really focuses on service, reflection, inquiry-based learning,” he said. “At the center of all four IB programs is what’s called the IB Learner Profile, and there’s 10 attributes to the IB Learner Profile. And they’re things like helping our students develop these personality character traits like being caring, being inquirers, being open minded, being principled, being risk-takers, being balanced in their lives.”

Edel said the life skills emphasized by IB’s programs are increasingly what employers are seeking.

“In our modern world, a lot of companies and a lot of employers aren’t looking so much for specific knowledge, because things are changing so fast,” he said. “They’re looking for character skills. They’re looking for life skills. They’re looking for people that can manage time, work well with others, that think creatively, that ask good questions, that know how to do research. These are the powerful learning attributes that make IB stand out compared to other programs.”

He said the program’s reach within each school differs.

“The Primary Years Program, which is at Liberty Elementary, is a whole-school program, so every single one of our students who comes through our door and joins us as a student is an IB student and all of the teachers at Liberty are IB teachers” he said. “That is also true at Mount Ogden Junior High — every student who comes in the door is an IB student, all of our teachers are IB teachers. At Ogden High, where the Diploma Program exists and the Career Program — those are a school-within-a-school model. Those programs, students and their families choose to join those programs.”

Tuesday’s celebration included several testimonials from faculty members and students from the three schools.

Also appearing was Utah State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson, who told the students they would benefit greatly from being in schools that support IB all the way through graduation.

“You will be so prepared when you get out of high school for the world ahead of you, and I am so excited for you,” she said.

Edel said he’s unsure if Ogden School District will implement the IB programs in additional schools in the future, but acknowledged there is a demand from students outside of the boundaries of the schools it’s implemented in presently.

“We’re seeing a lot of boundary exceptions coming into Mount Ogden and Liberty because parents are choosing to put their students in an IB school,” he said.