For those who would like to pursue District 155’s need for a significant increase in taxes, below is found information from the Illinois State Board of Education’s School Report Card:
Comments from Steve Willson left under another post that seem relevant here:
Three points:
1) D155 hired a consultant? The best estimate of the number of high school seniors in ten years is the number of 3rd graders in the district today, and that number is known. Hiring a consultant was pure waste.
2) According to the Illinois Report Card, D155’s average teacher salary in FY2016 was over $87,000. The average teacher salary at Richmond-Burton CHSD 157 was $55,600, at Marengo CHSD 154, $68,000, and at McHenry CHSD 156, $70,000.
3) At the risk of blaspheming, D155 does NOT do a good job educating our students. If they did a good job, the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards would be higher than average. Sadly, that percentage is lower than average.
According to the Illinois Report Card, only 23.4% of D155’s students meet or exceed standards and are ready for the next grade. The state average — and that includes Chicago — is 34%.
Worse, such statistics are most closely correlated with income in the community, a useful proxy for which is the percentage of students who are low income: 15.7% in D155 versus 22% for the state.
So D155 has fewer low income students but worse than average test scores and far higher than average teacher salaries.
Do NOT use the PARCC data.
The district did not participate widely in taking this test.
If I recall correctly, only the Freshman Alegebra I students took the Math test.
OK, one metric I noticed.
The district spends $9534 on instructional spending per pupil, and $15,530 overall per pupil.
So, 39% of the total cost per student has nothing to do with teachers, but instead overhead operations, ect.
THAT IS WAY TOO HIGH. T
hat should be 20 to 30% of the overall spending per pupil.
Arizona mandated that instructional spending should be 70% or higher.
I am fine with paying for good teachers, plus some of those salaries are because the teachers are also football coaches on the side, ect.
But all that administrative overhead?
They can do better.
The district just raised the registration fees, decided to now charge sports fees and the reason they gave for that was ” because other districts do it”, they let go many teachers, dropped kid loved classes.
The student enrollment is way down and predicted to continue going down for the next ten years.
If they needed all these supposed building repairs then why did they spend years and almost 5 million building and defending the bleachers at CLS.
Why build a multi million dollar theatre at CG and why again at CLS build an over 1 million dollar culinary kitchen?
They had roughly 78 million is slush funds 3 years ago.
The district does not need anymore of our money.
Amen Jgkm!
Why using PARCC testing in D155 is silly:
http://www.nwherald.com/2015/12/09/2015-parcc-results-mchenry-county-school-districts-emphasize-its-baseline-year/aiqosa/
All high school juniors were tested in the past, but with PARCC, districts were able to choose from a number of courses, meaning students in a variety of grades were tested.
In Community High School District 155, which administered Algebra 1 tests, a seemingly small percentage of students met or exceeded math expectations.
Director of Curriculum and Assessment Scott Kubelka said testing based on courses rather than grades likely played a part.
“Historically, our highest achieving students are in advanced coursework,” he said. “It was freshmen that took the test, but top-performing freshmen were already graduated out of that class. … So the top-performing students didn’t test at all.”
…
District 155 schools were among those with the highest percentages of students opting out of PARCC tests locally. Across the state, thousands of students – about 4 percent – did not take the test.
jgm6, the CG Arts Center was mostly built with community donations.
Deciding to not administer a test that would allow voters to compare school performance with the rest of the state seems intentionally evasive.
The kids in the honors and advance placement classes are generally well prepared for college.
The kids in the general classes, with no honors or advance placement classes, generally have some areas of weakness heading into college.
The terminology varies by school district.
For instance, some districts identify the general classes as intermediate and the honors classes as A level, etc.
A lot of parents of kids taking all general level classes have been told throughout elementary, middle, and high school that their kids are doing just fine.
Then the kid goes to college.
Many such kids struggle getting A’s and B’s in college in the more challenging required classes for their major.
Many of those kids don’t need remedial level classes (many also do), but they are not really “ready” for college.
There are people spending a lot of time attempting to address that issue, but a myriad of problems stand in the way.
One key is to identify areas of weakness early on, in elementary school, and even before that, to read a lot to young children and play games with them.
A big problem is public education is a monopoly assembly line union dominated system with many special interest groups.
Buyer (taxpayer, parent, etc.) beware.
It is no easy task for a parent of a child in elementary school who has weaknesses, to get feedback from the school that the child is not on track for honors and a level classes in high school, or to identify how the child is tracking on their own.
The result is a lot of parents pay high property taxes and college expenses for children getting mediocre results in college, and they wonder what went wrong,
Such parents are typically not very vocal, so that story gets little coverage.
That is a weak link in current public education system.
The average kids of parents who actually tried to be involved in their kids education (as opposed to parents who put little to no effort into the process).
The high school is just one component of that, along with the middle school, elementary school, pre-school, and whatever is happening or not happening at home.
Since child’s situation is unique and politics are involved, it is a very difficult problem to address.
To date there is no effective champion for public education change in Illinois.
New York City has Eva Moskowitz who has spearheaded opening charter schools dominated with minority enrollments.
The reports of the performance of children attending those schools are encouraging.
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The Crystal Lake High School District 155 Illinois Report Card is here:
http://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=profile&Districtid=44063155016
Some of the pdf’s on that website presently download as aspx.
If that is encountered, change aspx to pdf in the download.
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The PARCC has since been discontinued in Illinois high schools.
Also, the ACT has been replaced by the SAT as the college entrance exam taken by every Illinois public high school junior, courtesy of state taxpayers.
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One of the problems of standardizing testing in Illinois public schools is they are generally not effectively used to identify and improve individual student performance.
Meetings with individual parents at the elementary and middle school level to discuss the results are rare.
That would take a lot of time and effort.
The parent has to take the initiative to call the school and schedule a meeting to discuss the results and how to improve the child’s performance.
The schools themselves internally interpret the results and sometimes make changes at the curriculum, classroom, or student level (varies by teacher, school, and district), but not to the parent level.
Once again, buyer beware.
The report card is so racist!
Blacks do much worse, therefore the tests are bad!
LLavona says so!
what about this LLavona?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
Lavona can’t read English very well.
Please quit beating up on him.
He’s just a poor Communist and public school teacher.
He’s angry, he’s envious, he’s a imprudent and he’s crude.
Just let him vent here while his computer is hacked.
Public schools in general ….
http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-the-public-school-system-usually-a-twelve-year-sentence-of-mind-control-crushing-creativity-walter-karp-58-63-10.jpg