Happy holidays CPS family! We have a lot to celebrate this year. In this month’s corner, I get to share our most recent AQUESTT ratings. The State Department of Education compiles data on each public school district in the state and releases the information as a ranking. The ranks range from Excellent, Great, Good, and Needs Help to Improve. The numbers are not set, but approximately 8% of districts in the state will rank in the needs help to improve category, 30% will have a ranking of good, 32% get the ranking of great, and the remaining 29% of schools are ranked as excellent.

I realize that as soon as I start putting some numbers down some of you have probably stopped reading, but there is more… each school in your district gets its own score. So, we have an elementary score, a middle school score, and a high school score. These scores are determined by your students’ performance on the state sanctioned test. For juniors, this is the ACT test, and for 3rd-8th grades, the test is called the NSCAS test. Along with your test scores, the ranking can be moved up with improved attendance by all students and improved scores compared to the previous year’s tests.

Drum roll….. For the 2024-25 school year, our rankings were as follows. Elementary school Excellent, our middle school ranked Great, our high school scored an Excellent, and the district score overall is EXCELLENT! Each of our schools and our district is up from last year’s mark, except the elementary school, which was excellent last year as well.

As an administration, we are very proud of the efforts of our teachers and our students. Data always creates a story and as administrators we try to decipher the data to come up with the why? And how? The first ingredient in our recipe of success is great kids. We are blessed to work with kids whose families believe that education is important. Two other factors from our students made a big difference in our scores: effort and attendance. Our attendance marks last school year were the highest they have been since 2020. Last year we also set an improvement goal on our test scores that if we met the mark we would let school out a couple days early. This served as motivation for our students to give their best effort on the tests. With this small motivation our students blew their scores out of the water, almost doubling the improvement goal.

Test scores are not the end-all be-all that defines us as a school, but it is a very important indicator. No one has ever been given a great job or a happy family as the result of a test score, but the intangible qualities that lead to high scores, like hard work and consistency, definitely have an impact on your greater life goals.

So, congratulations to students, parents, teachers, and principals! We are setting a high bar, but we are excited to try and beat it!