'5-Alarm Fire' At Elmhurst School

ELMHURST, IL – A resident told the Elmhurst school board this week that it needs to handle a "five-alarm fire" at Conrad Fischer Elementary School.

Resident Bill Sullivan said the school's test scores have fallen dramatically in recent years. Statistics back him up.

In 2010, 77 percent of all Fischer students met the state's learning standards. By 2017, the rate had fallen to 35 percent, according to the Illinois Report Card website.

The district's overall score was 88 percent in 2010, but dropped to 53 percent by 2017.

In 2017, though, Fischer was well behind the district average, while it was only about 10 percentage points below it in 2010. (The state as a whole also saw a dramatic decrease.)

In the years after 2017, the numbers on the report card have been presented differently, but also indicate decreases.

In English language arts, 16 percent of students met standards in 2021, down from 33 percent in 2018.

For math, 12 percent met standards in 2021, a drop from 23 percent in 2018.

In his comments at Tuesday's board meeting, Sullivan said he wanted to discuss the "elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about." When officials do discuss the issue, he said, it's often in the "prejudiced voice of low expectations."

According to the report card, 55 percent of Fischer families are considered low-income. That is far higher than the rates at Elmhurst's other schools, some of which are below 10 percent.

"It wasn't so long ago that Conrad Fischer's proficiency scores did not look so different from the rest of the grade schools in the district," said Sullivan, who has had nine children go through the school.

"What changed? Poverty levels? No, we always had a significantly higher level of families in that category. Diversity? No, we have been a diverse school for decades," he said.

It was leadership that changed, he said. But he emphasized he was not referring to the school's teachers and principals, whom he praised.

"The leadership I'm talking about is the leadership in this room," he told administrators and school board members. "Some of the people responsible are still here. Some of them have gone to other districts."

The school has been in crisis before – in the late 1990s, Sullivan said. Proficiency levels, he said, dropped as low as 30 percent.

But the Fischer community, with the support of the district's administration, turned around the school in the next decade.

"We didn't use the language of victimhood that seems so popular today," Sullivan said. "Instead, we communicated the power of education to improve our lives and the people around us. We communicated personal responsibility and accountability for our success and our failures. It has been very hard to see that work dismantled and this ugly return to the prejudice of low expectations."

He asked the board to create a plan to address the "proficiency crisis" at Fischer. Its students, he said, cannot wait another year or even a semester.

The board does not typically respond to residents' comments. But later in the meeting, board President Kara Caforio noted Sullivan's comments. She said the board recognized it needed to improve students' performance.