Original Research by School Decision on Havana High School
Havana High School serves the roughly-four-hundred-student population of grades nine through twelve in Havana, a small county-seat town in Mason County where the Illinois River and historic downtown anchor daily life. The school is a regular public secondary in Havana CUSD 126, a three-school district that covers the area.
The enrollment is small for its grade band, around two hundred sixty students, distributed across the four grades. The student body is predominantly white, with representation from other groups present at modest levels. The school's free-or-reduced-price lunch rate and counts of students with individualized education plans or English learner status were not reported, so a parent may want to ask the school directly about the makeup of students receiving support services and what that landscape looks like.
State testing data and graduation rates for the school were not available, which is typical when a school operates below certain reporting thresholds or when recent data has not yet been published. A parent seeking specific proficiency numbers or recent graduation outcomes should contact the school or district directly to understand recent performance on state assessments and how students are progressing through to completion.
The town itself is stable in population, with a restored historic downtown that anchors civic and social life. The courthouse square, Riverfront Park with its footbridge and amphitheater, the Carnegie library, and a grid of locally owned restaurants and shops define the pedestrian core. The wider town is car-dependent, and the local economy rests on health care, public administration, and small retail. Employment did contract notably from 2023 to 2024, and a former coal plant remains a repurposing question in regional strategy, though this has not disrupted basic school operations or enrollment. Housing is affordable relative to the state and national benchmarks, with typical home values well below the state median and an estimated monthly mortgage payment that is modest. For families seeking a small-town school setting where everybody-knows-everybody sentiment is real and housing costs are low, Havana High fits that profile straightforwardly.
The district brief found no recent major referendum, curriculum overhaul, or facility project of the kind that would alter the parent calculus. The district structure has remained stable.
Program offerings, staffing detail, attendance and discipline data, and course-access specifics were not provided in the available data. A parent considering the school should ask about AP and dual-credit pathways, co-curricular offerings, and what advising support the school provides around postsecondary planning, as these details are essential to understanding the breadth of academic pathway available to students in a school of this size.
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