Elgin Public Schools Performance Accountability Data Is Positive

Once again, like most districts in the state, the Elgin Public Schools has some very good numbers and results in certain areas and some other areas that need continued work. One of the things to realize in this complicated accountability system is that it show 3 things: Your rank compared to other schools, your kids improvement per grade (this year’s classes compared to last year’s classes) and the growth of the students from year to year (same student’s scores from last year compared to this year). With that said, and all three areas being legitimate measures of how a school is doing, our school improvement goals and educational goals have been adopted based on the ranking component. Our board of education, administration and staff are all concerned with improvement and growth and want to be in the top 1/3 of districts in the state in ALL areas. That is quite a high goal but one that we strive to achieve. With all that said please understand that in a small school just two or three kids not performing well can take our averages from 100% to 70% or 80% depending on the size of the grade. In a class of 100, it would take 20 or 30 students not performing well to cause the same effect and when you have such small classes, one high performing class leaving and a low performing one coming in can also skew results.

At Elgin Public we are once again performing well on the yearly indicators and have some areas to work on as well. Our elementary reading scores are up SUBSTANTIALLY from two years ago, our science has taken a big step as well. Junior high math scores are a concern, as are our high school reading but our reading and math in our other two age group areas are quite good. As I mentioned above our goal is to perform in all areas in the top 1/3 of all schools in the state and in 8 out of the 11 areas scored we achieve that goal. In our 3rd grade through 12th grade results we made our lofty goal in two of the three areas with the one only missing by about 35 schools. Science was our highest 3-12 area with a rank of 11th and our greatest areas of improvement were in 6-12 grade science and 3-5 grade math.