North Cook News

The Pennoyer School Board recently discussed the recent state report card and the district's recovery in post pandemic years.

During the Nov. 9 school board meeting, the school board discussed the Illinois state report card for the 2021-2022 school year, which was released at the end of October. The state report card is an official source on public schools in the state of Illinois. It can compare different school districts and give data across all areas of education and is available to the public.

Pennoyer schools received a designation of "commendable." This means that the school has no underperforming student groups, they have a graduation rate of more than 67%, but they are not in the top 10% of schools statewide. A few years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Pennoyer realized that their chronic absenteeism rate was over 35%, so they created several strategies to address this issue. The report from the state report card has the state absentee rate at 29.8% and Pennoyer’s at 10.7%.

In their overall ELA scores, Pennoyer continues to exceed state averages and has a fairly consistent performance history, except for a small dip in the year following the pandemic. Math scores especially took a hit in the year after COVID, dropping just below the state levels despite being ahead of them before the pandemic. In the 2021-22 school year, the district made a huge comeback in math scores that put them back ahead of the state scores where they were in 2019.

"I feel like we are back on track," Kristin Kopta, Pennoyer School District superintendent, said at the meeting. "A lot a lot of that has been COVID driven: Students, missing teachers, being out sick, us not being able to run programs. So we have our intervention programs back up and running. We are doing math interventions as well as reading."