Earlville Community Unit School District (CUSD) 9 serves 400 students in a small rural community where staff, students, and families work closely together around each child’s success. Since 2018, the district has worked with Panorama to make support more systematic while preserving that close-knit culture. As Earlville looked more closely at belonging, attendance, and student data, that partnership gave leaders a clearer way to see what students need and respond with consistency.
Challenges
- Although Earlville was deeply committed to supporting each student, a student survey showed that only 18% of students felt a sense of belonging at school.
- Chronic absenteeism across the district was severe, with only 61% of high school students attending regularly.
- Benchmark and data meetings were time-intensive, with staff spending hours bouncing between disconnected tools and spreadsheets.
- Educators struggled to get a full picture of each student due to information being spread across too many places.
Solution
Results
- Earlville’s commitment to improving student belonging helped the district reach the 99th percentile for teacher-student relationships.
- District attendance steadily increased from 62% to 88%, with high school attendance reaching 90%.
- Data meetings that used to take 4 hours now take about 45 minutes; with student information all in one place, staff now moves more quickly toward support planning.
- Earlville was a recent recipient of National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence designation.
Challenges
Earlville CUSD’s goals were clear: improve attendance and make student support more consistent. But before that could happen, leaders had to address something more fundamental—whether students actually felt they belonged.
As Jenette Fruit, then Junior High School Principal and incoming Superintendent, recalls, “In 2018, when we completed a survey benchmark, only 18% of our students felt like they belonged to the school district.” That result forced the district to confront a culture issue that couldn’t be ignored. Earlville had to start by changing how staff approached building relationships. “We not only had to focus on the relationships with the teachers and students,” Fruit said. “But also teachers to teachers and students to students.”
That focus on relationships also changed how Earlville looked at attendance. In 2022, only 62% of district students were on track with their attendance—with just 61% of high school students attending regularly. Earlville had to treat the problem as more than a discipline issue. The district needed to understand why exactly students weren’t showing up and how to build a stronger reason for them to want to be there.
As Earlville worked to respond more intentionally to belonging and attendance, staff also needed a better way to see the full picture of each student. Data meetings made that harder, with staff spending too much time gathering information from different places before they could zero in on student needs. Superintendent Fruit shared, “I love meetings, but my teachers don't need to be sitting in a room wasting educational time, watching me click between screens.” Some meetings could stretch for far too long. “Spending 4 hours on one class—on one set of kids—is a lot,” Superintendent Fruit explained.
Even when staff did have all the right pieces of data, they still didn’t have them in one place. Fruit described the process as sorting through “about a thousand different spreadsheets” just to paint a clear picture of an Earlville student. That fragmentation made it harder to see the whole child quickly, which delayed the team in being able to talk about supports.
Solution
That 18% belonging score gave Earlville a starting point. With Panorama Surveys, leaders could see what students were experiencing, bring that data directly to staff, and focus on the district’s response around belonging and relationships. “Our focus was on belonging. All of our professional development focused on building relationships,” Fruit said.
From there, the work became bigger than a survey result. Earlville leaned into relationships and community support with various attendance incentives, family nights at the high school, an elementary atten-DANCE, and even community-sponsored field trips. The district’s mindset: if belonging was low, the answer was to build a stronger culture around students, because, as Fruit said, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Earlville later added Panorama Student Success to bring attendance, grades, behavior, life skills, and benchmark information all into one place. Fruit noted that “Panorama is definitely the backbone of a lot of what we do.”
The district has made Panorama part of its regular rhythm: teachers consistently receive their weekly attendance report percentage, the Panorama attendance calendar is used in truancy meetings with students and parents, and bi-weekly faculty meetings have made Panorama a standing 10-minute agenda item. These faculty meeting conversations are centered on attendance as well as Earlville’s Champions program, which gives each at-risk student a named adult advocate who can check in, monitor progress, and help the student stay connected.
“Panorama is not something that is a separate tool, it is a part of us,” Fruit said.
Results
Earlville’s belonging work showed up most clearly in the strength of teacher-student relationships. Though their 2018 Panorama Survey had surfaced a serious belonging gap (only 18% of students felt like they belonged to the district), the district used that data to make relationship-building a shared priority. After years of having this focus across schools, a new measure of teacher-student relationships ranked Earlville in the 99th percentile. Fruit shared that the district was screaming the news from the rooftops when those results came in, because it showed the culture shift was real and the district was finally moving in the right direction.
That shift also helped Earlville tackle attendance. District attendance rose from 62% (2022) to 88% (2026), with high school attendance alone climbing from 61% to 90%. What made this possible, as Fruit recalls, was attendance incentives, truancy meetings, and the consistent conversations about it with the students. She continued, “When you're intentional, everything will improve.”
Data meetings have also become dramatically more efficient now that staff can access the information they need in one place. What had been 4-hour meetings to piece together student information are now 45-minute conversations focused on action. “The time-saving was the biggest thing,” Fruit shared. “We can get through the kids a lot quicker now, instead of bouncing around on different screens to find whether or not a student was failing English.”
As Earlville’s support system became more consistent, district staff could better track which students needed a champion and follow through before concerns grew. That follow-through has strengthened student-teacher relationships across the district. Fruit shared, “This is where we've seen a giant success, because the kids will tell you everything if you just have that relationship with them.”
For example, Earlville homeroom teachers will check in with students in the Champions program, and they’ll send out a weekly Panorama survey for those students to input their grades and attendance—as well as the specific reason for both. This level of student participation and accountability is making all the difference. “With this written documentation from the child, the teacher and student can really work together on a goal for the following week, to get off the D/F list,” Fruit said.
Notably, all of this progress has earned the district broader recognition. Earlville was recently named a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, which reflects how far the district has come in culture, attendance, and student support.
Next Steps
Earlville’s next step is to strengthen how staff use data to follow through more consistently for students. Superintendent Fruit shared, “We’re actually changing our data teams and school leadership team procedures for next year. We’ve built a solid foundation, so it will be a smoother transition in how we discuss data. Our use of Panorama will only improve because of the intentional professional development the staff will receive.”
Ultimately, Earlville's goal is to empower teachers and school leaders to shape how the district supports students.
