2023 Highlights

 Dear East Prairie families,

As we approach the end of the 2023 calendar year, we want to take a moment to express our profound gratitude and appreciation for the love, care, and support our community continues to abundantly provide to our school.  Your efforts have considerably contributed to the ongoing growth, improvement, and success of our East Prairie community.

2023 Highlights

We are grateful to our students, teachers, support staff, families, Board, and community members.  Over the past year we have accomplished so much together.  Some highlights from 2023 include:

- Establishing a comprehensive, collaborative, and collective framework (RULER, plus other tools) to support the social, emotional, and behavioral needs of students;

- Creation of a Positive Behavior Team to develop tools like Pawsomes, minors, and majors to support the behavioral success of ALL students across ALL settings and parts of the school day;

- Development of the EPS/NN Mentoring Program.  The mission of the program is to enhance the academic, social, and emotional growth of the students in our community through meaningful connections with one another;

- Adoption of an extensive and comprehensive STEAM program for all K-8 students.  This adoption marks a commitment to fostering creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills among our students. Students experience going through a design thinking process that includes, exploring, planning using SMART goals, experimenting, reflecting and sharing; 

- Enhanced co-teaching and collaboration practices to support our multilingual students - these efforts led to a doubling of our exit rate on the ACCESS test for of our multilingual students;

- Addition of Tier 3 support for our students needing to develop foundational skills in math and reading - Developing systems, structures, and supports that ensure every child is met where they are at and has a collaborative team working to ensure their growth towards high expectations. 

- Adoption of a new elementary math curriculum - these resources paired with high-leverage instructional practices are a significant driver of student learning;

- New website to improve communication channels with parents and the community;

- Expanding family events throughout the school year to provide more opportunities for our community to gather, connect, and learn together;

- Increased partnership with community organizations (University of Chicago, Niles Township Government, etc.) to connect resources, ideas, and opportunities to our students and families.

For this work, and all that came before it, East Prairie has been recognized this year as:

- a top school as rated by U.S. News and World Report - we are part of fewer than 2% of schools nationwide by giving our elementary and middle school top school status.

- Niche.com has again recognized East Prairie as a top performing school - rating both our elementary and middle school in the top 3% in Cook County. We are number 18 of 617 middle schools and number 28 of 861 elementary schools. 

We take tremendous pride in serving our students, families, and community to the fullest extent possible and are committed to becoming the “premier school district in the nation” because we know in that pursuit of excellence lies incredible outcomes for kids and all of us.

We look forward to further building upon this important and impactful work together in the year ahead!