Altamont Unit 10 report cards: 'Commendable' designations for district's schools

Nov. 14—The Illinois State Board of Education recently released school report cards. They show how Illinois, each school and each district in the state are performing based on a wide range of educational goals, like attendance, test scores and absenteeism.

Altamont Unit 10, which has an enrollment of 677 students, received a "commendable" designation for its grade school, pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, and its high school.

Casey Adam has been the district's superintendent for four years and enjoys seeing the students grow both academically and emotionally.

"My favorite part about being a superintendent is knowing that I am directly influencing the educational experience of hundreds of children in our district," said Adam.

Adam said the school's overall scores have increased for both the grade school and high school for the previous four years she's been with the school. Both schools have improved in math and science. The grade school has raised its reading scores, and the high school has increased its English scores

"We have a fantastic administrative staff, and we're all moving in the same direction, and I think you can really tell that by the results of our data this year," said Adam.

However, she pointed out that state test scores are only one piece of the puzzle.

"Districts are far more complicated than, 'How did we score on our third grade math test?' It's more, 'Are our students continuing to grow?'" said Adam. "Once you get that data, do you know what to do with it? Do districts, do schools know, OK, here's where our students are. Here's where we want them to be. How do we make that happen?"

Kris Biggs, the grade school principal, discussed the Illinois report cards during the Nov. 12 school board meeting. He told the board that their English Language Arts (ELA) scores have increased, along with the math scores. Math is a subject the school plans to hone in on.

"That is a priority for us," said Adam.

Another topic discussed during the meeting was chronic absenteeism, which is a factor the report card takes into consideration when calculating a school's score. According to the report card, Altamont CUSD stands at a 13% chronic absenteeism rate.

When asked about what the school's plan is to lower that number, Adam mentioned how there was an to create and hang up posters, along with reaching out to their community partners to have a consistent message throughout the community: the importance of being at school.

"We're hopeful [that it's working], but it was just something that we started at the beginning of the school year," said Adam. "So we won't really know until next year [when] we look at those numbers kind of on an annual basis. We want to compare apples to apples."