Public school
Pershing Early Learning Center
Decatur, Illinois
- NCES ID
- 171185005582
- District
- Decatur SD 61
- School type
- Regular
- Title I
- Not designated
Pershing Early Learning Center is a public school in Decatur, Illinois, run by Decatur SD 61. It enrols 389 students — the 52565th largest of 4,435 public schools in Illinois.
Reported figures, 2022–2023
The Common Core of Data is a directory collection: it records size and staffing, not achievement. Nothing here says whether a school is good.
Enrollment
389
Teachers
10.0
Students per teacher
38.9
Free or reduced-price lunch
76.9%
How these figures are defined
Enrollment
Students reported in the autumn headcount. Size is not quality — it is here because it is the figure every other one has to be read against, and because a school of 90 and a school of 4,000 are not comparable on anything else.
Teachers
Classroom teachers in full-time equivalents, so a half-time teacher counts as 0.5. Non-teaching staff are excluded.
Students per teacher
Enrollment divided by teacher FTE. It is not class size: it counts every teacher against every student, including specialists who never take a full class. A school can have 15 students per teacher and 30 in the room.
Free or reduced-price lunch
Share of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals — the most widely used proxy for concentrated poverty in a school. Districts under community eligibility report all students as eligible, which inflates the figure and makes cross-district comparison unreliable.
Within Decatur SD 61
Schools in the same district, which is the comparison the data actually supports — a peer group defined by who runs them rather than by whichever names sort nearby.
- 1Macarthur High School1,105 students
- 2Eisenhower High School934 students
- 3Montessori Academy for Peace697 students
- 4Johns Hill Magnet School643 students
- 5Hope Academy563 students
- 6Dennis Lab School551 students
- 7Parsons Elementary School462 students
- 8Stephen Decatur Middle School459 students
- Enrollment−3.7%
- Teachers−61.5%
- Students per teacher+183.9%
- Free or reduced-price lunch+44.0%
Where this sits
Geographic context
District
Sources & licence
Collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. Nothing here is edited, interpolated or estimated.
Provenance
- National Center for Education Statistics
- Common Core of Data — school and district directory