Frances Willard Elem School

Frances Willard Elem School, an intimate elementary campus in Rock Island, Illinois, one of the schools within Rock Island SD 41, hosts 312 students, covering grades pre-K through 6.

Across the 13 schools in Rock Island SD 41 (6,292 students total), Frances Willard Elem School accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

On demographics, Frances Willard Elem School records that the most-represented group is Black (51%), with the rest of the student body spread across multiple groups; the rest comes out to 15% White, 12% Hispanic, 12% multiracial, 10% Asian. The wider county runs roughly 11% Black, putting the school's mix considerably more Black than the area baseline.

On the resource side, The school lists 24 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 13.1:1. The state averages around 13.9:1, so this campus is tighter than the state norm typical. Roughly 89% of students at Frances Willard Elem School qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. By comparison, Rock Island County runs at roughly 65%, so the school's eligibility rate is above the surrounding baseline.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Frances Willard Elem School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 20.1%, the actual is 26.6%, a residual of +6.5 points.

In the broader community, community-level numbers for Rock Island County indicate the typical household earns roughly $67,159 per year, about 25% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 11%. Across Rock Island County's 57 public schools (combined enrollment of about 21,921 students), Frances Willard Elem School is one campus in the mix.

Rock Island High School is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.4 miles from this campus. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. Among the 8 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), Frances Willard Elem School ranks 5th on composite proficiency, ahead of the local average of 25.4%.

The school occupies a city-core site.

Looking at the recent track record. Over the past 7-year window, the student count climbed 17%: 267 students in 2018 compared to 312 in 2025. The Asian share of enrollment contracted from 15% to 10% over that span.

In the discussion threads here, posts here usually surface around open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.