On Thursday November 19th I had a chance to spend an hour with Pilot Knob Elementary principal, Tom Benson, to discuss his school and why parents would want to choose them as a great place to educate their children. He had called me because a listing of mine (1632 Ashbury – Eagan) included a marketing line that suggested that even though the listing was in School District 197 that you could open enroll into District 196 and he wanted to get the chance to tell me about all of the great things going on at his school. It sounded like a wonderful learning opportunity for me.
Pilot Knob Elementary, located at 1436 Lone Oak Road in Eagan, is one of 5 elementary schools located in District 197 (West St. Paul, Mendota Heights, Eagan). The school has approximately 300 students in grades K-4 along with 20 teachers and support staff. Some of the interesting things about the school that parents should consider include -
- They have a great relationship with local employer, Lockheed Martin, who supplies engineers for math enrichment programs. In fact, the school has around 100 volunteers each week across different academic areas and highly encourages volunteer & parental involvement. Of the 300 students 70 of them were Academic All-stars last year participating in enrichment programs.
- The school has a number of remedial programs for kids at the other end of the achievement spectrum and has extra help and assistance programs for students that need to catch up.
- They view themselves as a place that needs to be open to the community after normal school hours and sponsors drama club, chess club, community education, book clubs and boy scouts.
- Pilot Knob and District 197 have worked hard to stay current on technology by providing laptops to all teachers, multiple mobile laptop carts for all students to use in classrooms and new interactive blackboards that tie into new media opportunities.
- Low class sizes are always a great thing for student learning and with class sizes as low as 12 in Kindergarten and 23 in 4th grade each child gets lots of individualized attention.
- One of the school’s teachers (Jennifer Parker) was among 11 finalists for Teacher of the Year in Minnesota in 2008
Test Scores
While certainly many schools offer similar programs one of the best ways to judge a school’s success is to look at test scores. The 2009 MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) test results for 3rd & 4th grade math and reading have just been released and Pilot Knob took a pretty big step upward. These compare very well with other nearby schools in District 196 -
| State Avg | Pilot Knob | |
| 3rd Grade – Math | 82.1 | 85.9 |
| 3rd Grade – Reading | 74.8 | 85.7 |
| 4th Grade – Math | 78.4 | 82.7 |
| 4th Grade – Reading | 74.5 | 83.3 |
Additional Resources
There are a number of additional links and tools that a parent might want to use in helping them pick the best school for their children including -
- The Minnesota Department of Education website which has all kinds of data including school overviews of Pilot Knob Elementary and similar close schools like Deerwood Elementary in District 196
- The Great Schools website compares all K-12 schools in the state with test scores, comparisons and parent ratings
- School Matters does similar comparisons for parents to evaluate the different options available for their students
- Finally, go check out the Pilot Knob Elementary website for photo’s, e-news, community calendar and Principal Benson’s Web Page
My thanks to Tom Benson (along with all the enthusiastic students I met) for the information and tour of one of Dakota County’s fine educational institutions!
