A Piatt County school district is going to be administering yearly assessments this spring but its school leader has a lot of questions about doing these yearly exams in light of the COVID pandemic's impacts on the last year of education.

Bement Schools superintendent Dr. Shiela Greenwood indicates the State of Illinois has given school leaders the choice of administering the yearly tests in the spring or fall and calls it controversial whether to do assessments or not.

For Bement schools, Dr. Greenwood indicates they felt it was best for them to do the assessments in May and begin to work on analyzing the data they get back. She believes it will help them get needed data for moving forward for their kids.

While getting the data back and analyzing it will be important, especially during this year's assessments, Dr. Greenwood indicates there is a long-standing frustration in the education industry of the wait time for getting those results back. She believes the data is going to be crucial this year to know where students are at as it relates to all the lost classroom time.

The State of Illinois has eliminated a few high school assessments and Dr. Greenwood believes comparing districts in the next year will be very difficult because everyone will be doing things differently. She hopes it will simply be used as a new baseline coming out of the COVID pandemic.