Summary:
Middle schools in Decatur School District 61 consist of one listed school, Stephen Decatur Middle School, serving grades 7–8 and enrolling 413 students; with no other listed schools, there is no meaningful local school-to-school comparison. In 2025–2026, proficiency was 13% in English language arts (ELA), 4% in math, and 22% in eighth-grade science—below Illinois rates of 56%, 40%, and 52%, respectively. Chronic absenteeism was 62%, compared with 43% districtwide and 24% statewide. The most important finding is that low proficiency in all three subjects coincides with substantially higher chronic absenteeism than both comparison rates.
Stephen Decatur Middle School is both the top- and bottom-ranked school in this one-school list, so that label does not distinguish it from local peers. Its strongest subject relative to Illinois was science, where it was 30 percentage points behind; the gaps were 36 points in math and 44 in ELA. It was also below the district in each subject, by 2 points in science, 4 in math, and 6 in ELA. SchoolDigger ranked the school 1,122 of 1,126 schools, at the 0th percentile, with 0 stars in 2025–2026.
Results did not keep pace with state gains: from 2024–2025 to 2025–2026, the school’s ELA rate stayed at about 13%, math fell from 6% to 4%, and science rose from 19% to 22%, while state rates rose in all three subjects. As a result, the average gap across the subjects widened from 33 to 36 percentage points. Within the school, grade 8 ELA proficiency was higher than grade 7’s—15% versus 11%—but both were far below the state rates of 63% and 58%. The school had a 17.9 student-teacher ratio in 2024–2025, and 86% of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch that year; these provide context, not an explanation of results.
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