The top reported proficiency rate is 43% in Science. The lowest is 18% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Bushnell-prairie City Jr High Sch
Bushnell-Prairie City Junior High School serves grades six through eight in a small, rural Illinois community. The school has a compact enrollment of about a hundred students, with roughly equal cohorts in sixth and seventh grade and a slightly smaller eighth-grade class. The student body is predominantly white, with meaningful but modest representation of Black students and a small Asian population; no Hispanic students are enrolled.
State assessment data is available only for grades six, seven, and eight, as the school serves the middle grades exclusively. In mathematics, proficiency rates are low across all three grades. Sixth-grade math proficiency sits in the mid-teens, seventh grade in the low twenties, and eighth grade in the high teens. Participation is near universal. The picture in English language arts is mixed. Sixth-grade ELA proficiency is in the low twenties, seventh grade in the high twenties, but eighth grade is notably stronger at over half of students meeting proficiency. Participation again approaches universal. Science is assessed only in eighth grade, where proficiency hovers around the mid-forties.
These results place the school below the midpoint for overall proficiency when compared to districts in McDonough County, a rural region in west-central Illinois. Illinois recently changed proficiency cut scores, which affects trend comparison; the data shown here cannot reliably be compared to prior years. A parent may want to look into further detail with the school about how students are progressing across these subjects and what support or intervention structures are in place for students not yet proficient.
The school is situated in Bushnell, a town of a few thousand residents about sixty miles southwest of Peoria. The town has a traditional blue-collar, agricultural character centered on manufacturing and farming; major employers include a hammer factory, commodity processors, and control and tank manufacturers. The downtown sits on Washington Street, and the town is small enough, at under three square miles, that schools embed into the city grid rather than occupying isolated suburban campuses. Housing is predominantly pre-World War II, largely owner-occupied, and the tone is described as quiet and low-density. The population has declined gradually over the past decade or so, and new residential construction is sparse. Housing costs are well below state and national medians, making the area notably affordable. The region's economic anchors nearby include Western Illinois University and a regional hospital in Macomb, about fifteen miles away, though Bushnell itself relies on local manufacturing and school employment.
Demographic and district data specific to Title I status, free-or-reduced-price-lunch rates, special education enrollment, English learner enrollment, and recent school or district changes were not available. The school is a regular public school, not a charter. Attendance and discipline data were not provided. No information on program breadth, course access, or staffing was available in the data supplied. A parent considering this school would benefit from direct conversation with administrators about academic support strategies, extracurricular offerings, and how the district is addressing the academic gaps evident in testing results.
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