2024!!! That's a Wrap!!!

 As we approach the end of the 2024 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.

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 2024 include:

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

- Creating a culture of care and support - over 98% of our staff are satisfied and engaged;

- Reaching all time high levels of learning for our students.  EPS IAR scores place it at the 92nd percentile for reading and 80th percentile for math compared to all Illinois schools. 

- Year two of the EPS/NN Mentoring Program, involving 40 of our middle school students.  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;

- 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;

- Creation of a schoolwide check-in/check-out (CICO) intervention to provide additional care, support, and attention to our students needing more support with behavior and attendance;

- Our K-5 STEAM special has been expanded with new projects and interdisciplinary learning opportunities.  For middle school students, we have introduced three new electives: Makerspace, Creative Design, and Design Studio.  These initiatives foster creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking, empowering our students to become innovative thinkers and lifelong learners.

- Continuing development of 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; 

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

- Extension and deepening of our writing practices, kindergarten through 8th grade;

- Robust and regular communications with families and community partners - weekly newsletters, Principal’s blog, new parent video page, The Gazette, social media messaging, updated website, and teacher communications;

- 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, behavioral health centers, 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 Model PLC District.  We are 1 of 4 districts in Illinois to receive this honor.

- 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 4% in Cook County.  We are number 20 of 614 middle schools and number 36 of 859 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!