Are we failing our students?

The O’Fallon Township High School (OTHS) district 203's return on investment, as measured by academic proficiency, is declining while each year revenues to fund the district’s facilities and operations significantly increase.  Their 2024 property tax levy is about $25,564,000 while is 2019 it was about $17,737,500, a 44% increase.  Although additional revenues from state, federal, and local sources make up their complete budget, our property taxes are the largest portion and reflect their general budget’s overall growth trend. 

Illinois Report Card data indicates that the percentage of OTHS 9th graders that meet or exceed grade-level standards has decreased between 2019 and 2024. The academic proficiency scores show only 39.3% of their students meet or exceed standards in English Language Arts (ELA) (compared to 53% in 2019) and only 38.4% of their students meet or exceed standards in Math (compared to 55% in 2019).   In other words, over 60% of our students cannot read and perform math at a 9th grade level.  These are the basic skills we all need to succeed. 

Over this 5-year period, spending per student has increased from an average of $10,505 to $13,709, a 30% increase.  Over this same period, their average teacher salaries only increased from $64,169 to $71,565, a 12% increase.  Even so, teacher retention is high at 95%.  Average class size (students per teacher) varies widely by grade with 9th grade averaging 23.4 and 12th grade only 12.2.

These trends show that just spending more money on education is not improving the quality of education for our students.  OTHS district 203 receives students from four K-12 school districts with widely varying skills and levels of academic proficiency creating a challenging educational environment.  Should we be considering school district consolidations to help reduce this variance with the added benefit of reduced administrative overhead costs?  

What we are currently doing is clearly not working.  We must work with all our local schools and school district boards of education to determine why this is happening and take action to reverse this alarming decline in academic achievement.  Our children’s futures depend on it.