GENEVA, IL- On Tuesday, September 19th, Geneva High School was named an Exemplary High-Performing School by the U.S. Department of Education. Principal Tom Rogers announced the news at an impromptu faculty meeting in the GHS library.
353 schools across the nation were recognized for “[setting] a national example for what it means to Raise the Bar in education,” according to the DoE press release announcing the award.
The announcement of the award last week was the culmination of a months-long application process.
“We were nominated back in the spring of ‘23 by the Illinois State Board of Education because of the outstanding standardized test scores that our students achieved and the very high graduation rate that we have here at GHS,” Principal Rogers said.
After being nominated, the Building Leadership team at GHS put together a detailed application. Each department of the school needed to be described in detail. In addition to the specific details, an overall summary of the school, opportunities offered to students, and a description of the culture were required.
“I want to give a lot of credit to the department chairs here at GHS,” Rogers said. “Each of them had to write a description of what great things go on in each of their departments.”
Mathematics Department Chair John Thomas has been teaching at Geneva for over 25 years. He takes pride in overseeing a department that epitomizes a professional learning community.
“I did the initial write up for the math department component of the application, basically describing a brief description of our curriculum, instructional strategies, professional development activities that we’ve taken on to help us continue to get better,” Thomas said.
Despite Geneva having a reputation as a great school district, awards like this are extremely rare.
“This is the first ever time a Geneva school has won this award,” district superintendent Dr. Andrew Barrett said.
The teachers and administrators know that this recognition was a long time coming.
“I think that we’ve always done a fantastic job,” Thomas said. “I think there’s always been that ability to be recognized. We’ve always held a high standard, always tried to maintain a college preparatory level of rigor across all our classes, regardless of what level.”
While it’s easy to brush off the award as something routine, the reality is that there are over 100,000 schools in the U.S., and less than 1% of them are selected for this honor.
“[I’m] incredibly honored,” Rogers said. “I’m incredibly proud, incredibly honored to be associated with amazing students. I’m incredibly grateful for the awesome teachers that we have who, without those teachers, our students wouldn’t achieve at those high levels.”
There are plans to make sure that the high school gets plenty of recognition moving forward. Representatives from Geneva will be in Washington, D.C. for the national award ceremony later this year. Here in Geneva, there will be recognition at a school board meeting, and later, a banner unveiling.
“I’d definitely put it up there as one of the highlights of my 17-year career thus far,” the principal said.
For now, the school keeps looking to improve.
“[The Blue-Ribbon award] shouldn’t change anything,” Thomas said. “We still want to keep getting better every year.”
As the school (and district) continues to grow and get better, there will hopefully be more awards in the future.
“The sky is the limit for our district, the schools,” Barrett said. “Our whole district, we have great kids and amazing community, great staff. And this is this is just the start.”
