School districts by the numbers
Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a multi-part series on the 2009 Illinois Report Card.
Area schools have received their report cards, and the results showed how are students are doing in math, reading, science and writing.
But the report cards contain more information than how the students are doing. The 2009 Illinois School Report Cards also provide information on area classrooms.
School report cards show the results of how students are performing on standardized tests, but those numbers don’t take into account how classrooms differ from each other — how some classrooms are crowded while others have almost too much space.
How did your school district’s classrooms measure up last spring?
Student/teacher ratio - elementary
Looking for a lot of one-on-one attention for your child? Move to Neponset, where the ratio of students to teacher was only 6.8 to one, the lowest in the county. The ratio was closely followed by the 8.2 to one in Leepertown and 9.7 to one in Ohio.
All but one of Bureau County’s schools were less than the state average of 18.3 to one. Only the Spring Valley Elementary District, with a ratio of 18.7 to one, was higher.
Average class size -
elementary
Most often the smallest schools see the greatest variety of class sizes. Leepertown ranges from one student in the fifth grade — who was also the only student in the fourth-grade class last year — to eight in its kindergarten class.
Other small classes were the second and third grades at Leepertown, each with two students, and the fourth grade at Leepertown and the second grade at Neponset, each with three students.
On the other end of the spectrum are the schools with big classes. The largest classes in the county were Spring Valley Elementary’s fifth-graders, with an average of 28 students in each classroom, more than five students more than the state average. Other big classes were SVE’s second-graders, with an average of 26.3; and Princeton Elementary’s second-graders and Ladd’s fourth-graders, each with an average of 26 students per class.
Student/teacher ratio - secondary
As you might expect, the smallest high schools had the lowest student to teacher ratio. Ohio High School, with its 46 students, had a ratio of one teacher for every 7.5 students, a drop from the previous year’s one per nine students, and LaMoille, with its 80 students, had a ratio of 7.7.
Only one high school in the county had a higher ratio than the state average of 18 students per teacher. Princeton High School has an average of 18.4 students per teacher, a decrease from the previous year’s 19.5 ratio.
Average class size - secondary
Ohio again had the smallest average class size, at just more than seven students per class, one student less than last year. Princeton and Hall both exceeded the state average of 19.2 students per class. Princeton’s average was 22.5 students, while Hall was just slightly over with 19.6 students per class.
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