"Our crime statistics for juveniles [are] significantly worse than East St. Louis," said Tom Marshall, an Elite Community Outreach board member who sits on the county's Juvenile Justice Council.
Marshall described the findings of a University of Illinois Chicago study he said was shared with the council at a meeting Monday of the Peoria Public Schools Board of Education.
"They're known for being one of the worst areas in the state," he said.
Marshall and Elite Founder and CEO Carl Cannon presented results Monday from the WINNING program, a four-week summer intervention for eighth graders at risk of being held back. Cannon said students arrive with attendance, behavior or engagement problems that threaten their promotion to high school. Marshall cited another study saying students held back in eighth grade are significantly more likely to leave school, and Cannon drew a straight line from there to crime.
"Dropout rates mean streets," Cannon said. "We can't just leave it to social promotions. We can't leave it to the streets to raise our kids."
Of 20 students the district referred this summer, 18 completed the program and will move on to ninth grade. Cannon said the students completed more than 1,000 lessons on the IXL learning platform, with 32% reaching mastery.
Newly elected board member Andy Diaz pressed the presenters on those numbers.
"Do you believe that in the three and a half weeks you had with them," he asked, "that that now makes them ready to be fully participatory and successful in ninth grade?"
"They're ready. Yes," Cannon said. "These are students that didn't master anything all year, and to have them master one was pretty spectacular."
The district paid Elite $31,400 for a program Marshall said cost about $49,000 to run, with donors covering the difference — a gap board member Christina Rose said she'd like to close.
"I would love to see what all those costs were," Rose said, "so that maybe we can work on fully funding you in a future year."
Superintendent Jerry Bell, attending one of his first meetings since taking over July 1, said about the program, "Money well spent. Money well spent."
Other business
Also at Monday's meeting, the board:
- Tabled approval of the July 1 minutes unanimously after Rose noted they failed to record the roll call votes electing the board's new president and vice president.
- Approved a $1,037,636 one-year contract with FamilyCore for 18.63 full-time equivalent family school liaisons at 15 schools, providing attendance intervention and suspension/expulsion prevention for at-risk students. The vote was 6-1, with Rose voting no.
- Approved, 5-2, an intergovernmental agreement with the Peoria County Regional Office of Education to continue the Safe School Program, over objections from Diaz and Wilson that the district's share of the cost — roughly half the program, by board member Martha Ross's estimate — appears nowhere in the agreement.
- Approved a $137,126 contract with the Children's Home Association of Illinois for two full-time behavioral health therapists, one at Franklin Primary and one at Glen Barton.
- Approved a $120,200 contract with Stellar Systems for records imaging and document management.
- Approved a $72,150 renewal of IXL, the digital learning platform for fifth through eighth graders — the same platform WINNING students used this summer.
- Approved a $17,400 contract with the Center for Prevention of Abuse, continuing the Keeping My Body Safe program, which meets the state's Erin's Law mandate for sexual abuse prevention education in grades K-12.
- Approved the 11th renewal of an agreement with Dr. Andrew Morgan to write physical and occupational therapy prescriptions, capped at $5,000.
- Approved a contract for Joyce Nelson as director of special education through June 2027.
