West Cook News

The Maine Township board reviews portions of the district through the state report card.  

“And so, what we do see and we've been asked and it's just the reality of our circumstance,” Shawn Messemer, assistant superintendent of curriculum at Maine Township High Schools said.  “If you look here and if we look at the district, all the schools are there. But we do see a drop, right? A pursuit of a steady, steady downward trend. And if you look at the yellow and the blue on the right, that really does represent the effects of the pandemic. You do see that big dip there as there's no data for 2020 - that was this spring of the pandemic. So that's when everything kind of came off the rails, and we left on March 17th and they never really tested that year. And then coming back, this yellow represents the year where we've had basically 50% or more of our students remote. So when you look at that blue that is really sort of starting our road back. Now there's a high there is a high point in this and that's that 39.5%. But you can see that blue bar in Math: high. Sort of that bounce back. That's something that a lot of other school districts have not seen. In fact, they've seen that continued trend down both in English and math. However, I was super excited this year to see that we've started to climb back in that math space in a way that a lot of other districts have not done.”  

Shawn Messemer, the assistant superintendent of curriculum, gave the school board an update on the Illinois state report card results. The report card came out at the end of October, and he gave an overview at one of the November board meetings. He went more in depth on some of the topics for the December board meetings. The district has come up with several methods to try and close the gap from the pandemic, as well as address some of their district's particular issues. He began by reminding the board that all three of their high schools had received Commendable status, under the top 10% who receive exemplary, the same status they have all received the past three years. On average the three schools have a 94% graduation rate. One of the biggest issues they have been addressing is lowering the remediation rate for community college, down almost 30% since 2017. Students from Maine take remediation courses much more often than other districts even though all other numbers match up better than many high schools. One of the few other areas in which the Maine district is under the rate of the state is chronic absenteeism, which allows students to be absent 18 or more days with a valid excuse. All the schools in the state have been struggling with this since the pandemic, but Maine’s numbers have not started going back down yet. The district is continuing to focus on bringing students back into the school.