Coal City CUSD 1

Coal City CUSD 1 serves 2,129 students at five schools, spanning early childhood through high school. Attendance is a relative strength: chronic absenteeism ranged from 8% at Coal City Elementary School to 16% at Coal City High School, below the state rate of 24% at every school. The clearest academic contrast is in IAR all-grades ELA: Coal City Intermediate School scored 77.2% and Coal City Middle School scored 77.0%, compared with 51.8% at Elementary—a 25-point spread.

Intermediate and Middle stand out in ELA, both about 21 percentage points above the state’s 56% result; Elementary was 5 points below state level. Middle leads in IAR all-grades math, with 61% proficient, 21 points above the state. Elementary and Intermediate also exceeded the state in math, by 13 and 15 points, respectively. High School’s 11th-grade ACT results were above state results in ELA, math, and science by 8, 9, and 9 points. Its PreACT results differed by grade: ninth graders were above state results in all three subjects, while tenth graders were 6 points below state in ELA and 11 points below in science.

Recent IAR results show mixed movement: Intermediate improved in ELA by 4 points, while Elementary fell by 8; across the three IAR schools, the average ELA advantage over the state narrowed by 6 points from the prior year. SchoolDigger rankings also moved down between 2023–2024 and 2025–2026: 9 percentile points at High and Middle and 8 at Intermediate. Context measures vary less than achievement: free/reduced lunch eligible shares in 2024–2025 ranged from 28% at High to 34% at Elementary, while student-teacher ratios ranged from 12.5 at Middle to 16.1 at the Early Childhood Center. These figures are context, not explanations for school results; all-grades scores cover different grade spans, and year-to-year results reflect different student cohorts.