Naperville-area school districts outpace state averages in 2024 Illinois Report Card

Elementary and middle schoolers across the Naperville area are getting back to pre-pandemic proficiency levels, especially in literacy standards, according to the newly released 2024 Illinois Report Card .

Per the annual review from the Illinois State Board of Education, 61.2% of students from the elementary to middle school level at Indian Prairie District 204 met or exceeded literacy standards last year, a mark that's actually higher than how students fared in the 2018-19 school year.

Naperville District 203 showed comparable recovery in the latest stats, with 72.8% of elementary and middle school age students meeting or exceeding literacy standards last year, on par with performance levels of six years ago.

"We are quite pleased with our results," Patrick Nolten, District 203's assistant superintendent for assessment and accountability, said in a call Monday.

Produced annually for decades, the state's yearly report card aims to show how each school and district — and Illinois as a whole — are progressing on a wide range of educational goals, ISBE says. The state released its 2024 assessment last week .

The report card is composed of a variety of measures of student achievement, from student mobility and graduation rate to chronic absenteeism and whether a ninth-grader is on track to graduate.

Academic performance alone has its own subset of indicators.

One is the Illinois Assessment of Readiness — a statewide standardized test that measures third- through eighth-graders' skills in math and literacy, known as English Language Arts (ELA). When students' scores meet state standards, their skills are considered proficient.

The state's assessment readiness in ELA is where District 203 elementary and middle school students posted nearly 73% proficiency and District 204 students more than 61%. In both districts, students far outpaced statewide stats. On average, report card data shows that 41% of Illinois elementary and middle-schoolers met or exceeded literacy standards last year.

Compared to the 2018-19 school year, District 203 has just about "recovered to the level of proficiency we were at just before the pandemic," Nolten said. Six years ago, 73.3% of third- to eighth-graders proved to meet or exceed literacy standards.

IAR math scores are on a similar trajectory. Last year, 59.5% of elementary and middle school students at District 203 met or exceeded standards. District 203 hasn't quite reached pre-pandemic proficiency, still down 3.9% from the 2018-19 school year. But math proficiency has been steadily increasing in the district since falling amid COVID-19.

"We're very close," Nolten said. "That's some strong, positive news."

For both math and ELA, District 203 is in the 99th percentile across Illinois, meaning that "we've done better than 99 out of 100 in math and ELA compared to all other districts in the state with respect to the percent of students that are proficient," Nolten said.

Statewide, only 28% of assessed students met or exceeded IAR math standards last year. However, state averages reflect changes at the district level. After reaching 31.8% proficiency six years ago, math scores fell during the pandemic and have been inching up since.

The same goes for District 204. In the 2018-19 school year, 56.5% of assessed students met or exceeded IAR math standards. That number dropped to 45.3% by the 2020-21 school year. On the rise since, 53.1% met or exceeded standards.

For high schoolers, the state report card looked at SAT scores. In District 203, 59.8% of students in grades 9-12 met or exceeded ELA standards and 56.2% were proficient in math last year. For District 204, SAT scores showed 57.4% of high schoolers were proficient in ELA and 55.9% were proficient in math.

Weighed against all of Illinois' districts, on average 31% of high schoolers across the state were proficient in ELA and 26% were proficient in math.

District-wide results aside, Naperville-area schools individually held their own on the state's report card, with several campuses ranking among the top in the state.

As part of the report card, schools are rated "exemplary," "commendable," "targeted" or "comprehensive."

Exemplary schools are those performing in the top 10%, while those deemed commendable are meeting expectations. Targeted and comprehensive schools receive additional funding and support to improve student outcomes, according to the ISBE.

Three of District 203's 22 schools were designated exemplary for the last school year: Ellsworth Elementary School, Scott Elementary School and Naperville North High School. The district's remaining 18 schools were commendable, the state report card said.

District 204 had nine exemplary schools: May Watts Elementary School, Wayne Builta Elementary School, Oliver Julian Kendall Elementary School, Graham Elementary School, Gordon Gregory Middle School, Scullen Middle School, Still Middle School, Metea Valley High School and Neuqua Valley High School. The rest of District 204's school sites were commendable.

That's a change from previous state assessments. In its 2023 report card , ISBE deemed two District 204 schools targeted: Brookdale Elementary School and Longwood Elementary School. Both, however, improved last year, the 2024 report card found.

As for other strides made, both District 203 and District 204 saw chronic absenteeism drop last year.

In District 204, chronic absenteeism shrunk to 16.8% last year, dropping from 19.3% the prior year. This is the first time since the 2019-20 school year that absenteeism in District 204 has gone down.

Illinois law defines a chronic absentee as a student who misses 10% of school days within an academic year with or without a valid excuse. That's 18 days in an average 180-day school year.

Chronic absenteeism in District 203 dropped to 15%, down from 16.9% the year before. Absenteeism has been on decline in the district since jumping to 19.8% in the 2021-22 school year. Still, absenteeism rates still have a ways to go before they are on par with pre-pandemic averages.

"We continue to make efforts towards improving students' attendance," Nolten said. "We were in the single digits pre-pandemic."

Beyond numbers, District 203 is also conscious to consider students' "school experience today," Nolten said.

"Now that we're well past the pandemic," he said, "what is it about the school experience now that we can change or modify or adjust over time to make it something that students are readily interested in?"