Mahomet-Seymour officials highlight all-district 'exemplary' state designations and push sustained focus on attendance and curriculum

Mahomet-Seymour CUSD 3 district leaders told the school board on Nov. 3 that every district building earned an "exemplary" summative designation on the 2024'5 Illinois School Report Card, and they outlined next steps to sustain that performance.

Dr. Bagby, a district administrator, told the board "this is a huge accomplishment" and credited a combination of strategic planning, building-level goals and teacher, student and family effort for the results. She said the state'level designation aggregates several indicators including student growth, proficiency, graduation rate, chronic absenteeism and the Five Essentials climate survey.

Why it matters: The summative designation is the state'reported summary of multiple indicators and is used publicly to compare schools across Illinois. District staff said the elementary and junior-high bands depend heavily on student growth (50 percent of the band score, split between ELA and math), while the high-school band places more weight on graduation-related measures.

Officials said attendance was among the district priorities that helped lift scores. District staff reported roughly halving chronic absenteeism from the 2023'24 to the 2024'25 reporting period after a mix of targeted interventions and a data clean-up that corrected how short absences were recorded. "We did a better job of cleaning up things," a staff member said when board members pressed on the role of reporting changes.

The district also previewed strategic plan action steps for 2025'26 that district administrators expect to intersect directly with school improvement plans: continued rollout of K'5 literacy materials (CKLA/Amplify in some buildings), adoption of the STAR benchmark for more frequent assessment data, updates to the district MTSS protocol, math curriculum supports, and expanded career and technical education and dual-credit opportunities.

Directives and follow-up: Staff emphasized continued attention to three areas: (1) maintaining accurate attendance reporting with daily monitoring and targeted family outreach; (2) using STAR benchmark results for more frequent, data-driven teacher adjustments; and (3) aligning building-level three-year goals to the district strategic plan so gains are sustained. Bagby said that some indicators (for example the ACCESS measure for English learners) only apply when a building enrolls 20 or more EL students.

Board members praised principals and staff for progress and asked administrators to consider what district-level tasks could be reduced so building teams have bandwidth to implement school improvement work.

Ending: District administrators said they will continue monthly reporting of attendance metrics, provide STAR data to principals after the next assessment window, and circulate updated MTSS protocols to building leaders.