The top reported proficiency rate is 55% in Science. The lowest is 31% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Glenn Raymond School
Glenn Raymond School serves grades one through five in Watseka, a small city serving as the county seat of Iroquois County in eastern Illinois. The school sits on the edges of the residential grid rather than downtown, functioning as a neighborhood campus in a place where civic life centers on the library and parks.
Watseka itself is experiencing slow population decline rather than growth, falling steadily over recent decades. The city has responded with a Community Revitalization Plan adopted in 2023, pursuing affordable workforce housing and downtown rehabilitation. The housing market remains inexpensive, which draws some buyers from higher-priced regions of Illinois. Health care and social assistance dominate employment, led by Iroquois Memorial Hospital as the largest employer; agriculture in the surrounding farmland forms a structural part of the economy. A manufacturing plant opened in 2024 in a former industrial building. The downtown has a traditional Main Street form with historic storefronts and a farmers market June through October, though outside that compact core, residential streets reflect a car-oriented pattern with big-box shopping and drive-thru businesses along the highway.
The district itself underwent a major structural change following a 2021 referendum: voters approved bonds to build a new consolidated K-12 campus at the high school site—the only district building not in a floodplain—closing multiple schools and combining four separate facilities onto one campus. This consolidation carries decades-long implications for where Watseka children attend school and for local property taxes. Glenn Raymond is one of the schools affected by this restructuring.
The school enrolls a modestly sized student body, the great majority white, with smaller shares of Hispanic, multiracial, and other students; data on free-or-reduced-price lunch eligibility was not available. Staffing, attendance, and discipline data were not provided. The school is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet, and not designated Title I, though the specific criteria for that designation at this school were not included in the data.
On Illinois state assessments in the 2024-25 school year, Glenn Raymond's proficiency results in math and English language arts show uneven performance across grades. In English language arts, proficiency rises noticeably from grade three to grade five, reaching a meaningful level by fifth grade. Math proficiency tells a different story: third grade shows modest results, fourth grade dips markedly lower, and fifth grade recovers to a more solid level. In fifth-grade science, proficiency sits at a moderate level. The school's overall proficiency index places it in the bottom quartile among the county's tested schools. State testing does not include the school's first and second grades, so results are unavailable for those grades. Testing data for grades six and beyond do not appear because the school does not serve those grades; it is an elementary school within a district now consolidated into a single K-12 campus.
The proficiency pattern—stronger in upper elementary grades, particularly in language arts, but with notable softness in fourth-grade math—is something a parent may want to understand better by asking the school directly about instruction and supports at that grade level. The overall position relative to peer schools in the county suggests room for improvement across subjects.
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