Summary:
The three schools in Marengo-Union E Cons D 165 serve students from prekindergarten through grade 8 and enroll 1,092 students altogether. Their reported achievement varies considerably: Locust Elementary School is the clearest academic standout, especially in math.
In 2025–2026 all-grades results, Locust led in both subjects, with 60% proficiency in ELA and 62% in math—4 and 22 percentage points above state results. At the other end, Ulysses S Grant Intermediate School had the lowest results: 44% in ELA, 12 points below the state, and 35% in math, 5 points below. Marengo Community Middle School fell between them in ELA at 53% (3 points below the state), while its 36% in math was 4 points below. Grade-level results add important contrasts: Locust’s grade 3 was 13 points above the state in both ELA and math; Grant’s grade 4 math was 8 points above, but its grade 5 results were 18 points below in ELA, 14 below in math, and 20 below in science. Middle school grade 8 science was 3 points above the state, while its ELA and math were each about 5 points below. The schools serve different grades, so all-grades results are not same-grade comparisons.
ELA results rose at all three schools from the prior year, while math results fell at all three: ELA increased by 6 points at Locust, 1 at Middle, and 2 at Grant; math declined by 6, 2, and 3 points, respectively. The state’s results rose by 3 points in both subjects, so the gains were not uniform across schools or subjects. SchoolDigger’s recent ranking percentiles also fell for Middle, from 65 in 2023–2024 to 41 in 2025–2026, and for Grant, from 60 to 28. Other reported measures offer context: 2024–2025 free/reduced lunch eligibility ranged from 55% to 59%, and student-teacher ratios ranged from 14.3 to 16.0. In 2025–2026, chronic absenteeism was lowest at Locust, at 10%, compared with 20% at Middle and 17% at Grant; the statewide rate was 24%.
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