North Cook News

The Evanston Township High School District 202 School Board recently reviewed the previous year's survey and data results at its November board meeting.

Carrie Levy; Evanston director of Research, Evaluation and Assessment; gave a brief overview of enrollment in the district this year and how it has changed over the past few years. Overall enrollment is down approximately 40 students this year from last year, which fits the trend of recent years. Enrollment of white students has stayed constant over the last five years, with Hispanic students trending up and Black students trending down. Both the special education and bilingual enrollment numbers are seeing returns to pre-COVID-19 levels.

"So as we continue—and my team really is trying to work on focusing on data reporting and visualization through an equity lens—in addition of the qualitative data from the schoolwide surveys, being able to just aggregate that by race, ethnicity and gender," Levy said in the meeting. "This is how students are self-reporting is what we are reporting here. And because it's self-report and we have this in our climate survey, we're able to include students who identify as male, female, nonbinary, transgender. So to have enough students to be able to report that is new this year."

Levy also gave a brief year-in-review of the 2021-22 school year. The report had three sections: social emotional learning and wellbeing, academics and attendance, and post-high school plans. Fifty-six percent of students responding to the survey said that they felt a high level of belonging, and 48% said they felt their teachers cared about their lives outside of school.

Last year’s daily attendance rate was 92.8%, which was higher than the state average. Ninety-three percent of the freshman class was on track for graduation. All subgroups in the district had a final unweighted GPA of 2.8 or higher, with a cumulative mean GPA of 3.25. Graduation rates have been in the mid-90s for the past few years, with approximately 76% of graduates enrolling in higher-education institutions within two years of graduation.