This is a short post to release a pent up frustration that I have. This post may make me some enemies, but I will stand by my statements. Because I am PASSIONATE about our children and their education.

Our priorities as a community are messed up, frankly. Our 190 Middle School students currently have to essentially BEG the public for money to support fields trips that will help in their primary education. PLEASE support them by following the link below:

https://app.99pledges.com/fund/fallcreekcrickets?fbclid=IwAR3DaxvNVkjBcOniFZEzMZ2ANFDRoYDS6fdWSuh2nNi-CjZhoraV3fwl3qs

Apparently, there wasn’t room in the school’s budget to pay for class field trips. However, you know what the sitting School Board did find money for? A pole vault platform:

No need to start a fundraiser for this, no sir! They consider a pole vault platform that will service perhaps a couple dozen students twice as important as the entirety of the Middle School being able to go on their academic field trips for the year.

On a related note, I, an individual parent whose annual salary is roughly equivalent to that of one of our teachers, was able to match and exceed the entirety of the PTO’s “Directed Funds” for the 2020-2021 school year with individual donations over time directly to our teachers, largely funding over a dozen projects that the teachers felt were directly necessary for the education of our children:

While I’m sure that most of the PTO’s projects are worthwhile, only a couple of them appear to directly assist with the education of our children.

And that’s what a School District, and a PTO, should be primarily concerned with. Education. First and foremost. While the other stuff is “nice to have”, it should always come secondary to the direct education of our children’s minds.

While a pole vault is certainly a good thing to have to help train our student’s bodies and coordination, the likelihood of it directly helping them be successful in the workforce is slim.

While it’s important to give to families in need, and to support children during Christmas time, I would think we’d want to make sure that our hard working teachers have EVERYTHING they need to educate our children FIRST and foremost.

This, makes me sad. We can do better. For our children’s education. For their future. I know that we can do better than this. And we should.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has released (as of two days ago), the scores for the past school year.

I am now providing updated timeline ranking which now includes the new data. Something else that I’d overlooked was the Altoona School District. I could have placed it on the Eau Claire/Chippewa chart, as its proximity is so close to Eau Claire that it can be hard to tell whether you’re in Eau Claire or Altoona. However, I decided that it would make more sense to place it into the “Rural Schools” chart, as that is how the Altoona School District has been “behaving”, more similar to other rural schools than the more “urban” school districts.

As you can see in the chart above, while Chippewa Falls is frankly abysmal, Eau Claire is quickly starting to catch up to our district after many years of worsening failure, matching our climb with their own.

Fall Creek is still showing a positive trend in its ranking compared to other schools in the state, jumping up from 181 to 142. This is good news! We have survived the pandemic, and not only that, the pandemic doesn’t appear to have harmed our position as it has for other school districts. I think that credit goes to our hard working teachers that adjusted to the situation and did fantastic work through remote learning and adjusting to the needs of their students.

However, it’s still not quite caught up with the loss that it suffered between 2013 and 2018, and has a little left to go to catch up to itself from where it was when this data was first recorded back in 2012-13, when it had a rank of 134 out of 423 schools.

Now, let’s look at the rural schools. I’m going to make this one a bit bigger so that you can see more detail:

As you can see, we started in “third place” amongst rural schools, and have so far ended in third place. So, at least, we have maintained our position in the Chippewa Valley. Adding Altoona to this chart is interesting, as it shows that that district has substantially improved since 2013-14 compared with most of the other districts and is now the “top dog” right above Stanley-Boyd.

Conclusion: We’re on a positive path forward. However, I still think we can do better, and certainly better from a state-wide perspective. We should be at the top of the state in how well our district is performing, rather than “third place” in the Chippewa Valley.

You can find my datasheets and charts here, if you’d like to look at the numbers yourself: