Pocahontas Center, Pocahontas IL

Original Research by School Decision on Pocahontas Center

Pocahontas Center is a small pre-K through eighth-grade elementary school located on East State Street in the village of Pocahontas, a rural community in Bond County positioned along Interstate 70 about a half-hour east of St. Louis. The school serves the village and its immediate surroundings, educating just under two hundred students in a setting where classroom sizes are modest and the student body is predominantly white.

The most visible characteristic of test results at Pocahontas Center is volatility across grade levels and subjects. In English language arts, proficiency is strong in the lower and middle grades, with grade five particularly high; it dips in grades six and seven but recovers in grade eight. Math proficiency is highest in grade three, then declines steadily through grades four and five, drops steeply in grades six and seven, and rebounds modestly in grade eight. Science proficiency, where tested in grades five and eight, is solid in grade five but drops by grade eight. The school's overall proficiency index places it in the top quartile among the two school districts in Bond County. A parent looking at these results should understand that Pocahontas Center shows pockets of real strength, particularly in early elementary and in certain grade-level cohorts, alongside grades and subjects where fewer than half of students meet proficiency standards. The shift in performance from lower to upper elementary is stark enough that a family might reasonably ask the school how it addresses mathematical conceptual difficulty at the transition from grade five to grade six, where proficiency drops sharply.

Pocahontas Center's peer environment is small and stable. The school is a regular public school with no specialized focus, serving mixed ages in a single building. The village itself is quiet and tree-lined, with civic life centered around a small uptown park and a larger village park with ballfields and fishing areas. The economy is modest, oriented largely toward Interstate 70 travelers (motels, restaurants, antique shops) and small retail; residents who work in higher-wage fields often commute to the St. Louis Metro East region. Housing in the zip code is affordable relative to state and national medians, and a residential subdivision is under active development nearby. The school is the main educational anchor for the village, since students leave town for high school in Greenville, the county seat about twenty miles away.

A significant context for Pocahontas Center is a district-level change: in late 2021, the school board voted to close Sorento School, a small elementary building in another town, and reassigned Sorento's students to either Pocahontas or Greenville based on new boundary lines. That consolidation reshaped which families now attend Pocahontas Center and has made attendance boundaries an active topic in the county. For families considering moving to Pocahontas, this means the school's enrollment and peer composition may still be settling after that shift.

The school provides no data on free and reduced-price lunch rates, English learner enrollment, or special education identification, so a parent seeking to understand the socioeconomic or demographic diversity of the student body should ask the school directly. The school website was not available in the sources used here. Pocahontas Center offers a conventional elementary and middle-grades program within a small-town setting where the school serves as a steady civic institution rather than a destination choice; the fit depends on whether a family values that quiet, stable, affordable context and is willing to accept variable test proficiency across grade levels as part of the school's learning environment.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 375%

School 75% · District 68% · ▲ 7 pts above district

▲ 29 pts above state median

Grade 462%

School 62% · District 45% · ▲ 17 pts above district

▲ 25 pts above state median

Grade 556%

School 56% · District 37% · ▲ 19 pts above district

▲ 26 pts above state median

Grade 614%

School 14% · District 32% · ▼ 17 pts below district

▼ 10 pts below state median

Grade 711%

School 11% · District 37% · ▼ 26 pts below district

▼ 18 pts below state median

Grade 832%

School 32% · District 30% · ▲ 2 pts above district

▲ 9 pts above state median

English language arts

Grade 375%

School 75% · District 56% · ▲ 19 pts above district

▲ 31 pts above state median

Grade 467%

School 67% · District 55% · ▲ 12 pts above district

▲ 19 pts above state median

Grade 594%

School 94% · District 79% · ▲ 14 pts above district

▲ 42 pts above state median

Grade 686%

School 86% · District 72% · ▲ 14 pts above district

▲ 35 pts above state median

Grade 753%

School 53% · District 66% · ▼ 13 pts below district

▲ 1 pts above state median

Grade 864%

School 64% · District 56% · ▲ 7 pts above district

▲ 10 pts above state median

Science

Grade 575%

School 75% · District 54% · ▲ 21 pts above district

▲ 38 pts above state median

Grade 855%

School 55% · District 38% · ▲ 17 pts above district

▲ 15 pts above state median

This schoolBond County CUSD 2, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.