Every year, as students, we are bombarded with testing statistics, how we compare to other schools, and how we compare

to the rest of the state. I dont know about you, but there were definitely times that the information went in one ear and out the other. I wanted to do something that could compare the towns on more than just tests. Academics are definitely important when it comes to which school district to go to, but there are more important things than standardized tests. I took six areas that I thought were important and did my best to rank the suburbs close to Rochester. I used Byron, Stewartville, Triton, Pine Island, and Kasson.

Everyone knows the Byron School District is pretty amazing academic wise, but I thought I would see if it is all it is said to be. It turns out that there is some serious competition here! I took the amount of students that passed the reading MCA tests as well as the math MCA tests and put them into a graph (figures 1 and 2).

It is clear to see that math scores are much more varied in the percentage of people passing. Byron is leading the way with 74%, but at times it gets down to as low as 45% with Triton. The reading tests are much more clumped together, as all of the schools are between 78%-88%.
Key: 1: Byron 2: Stewartville 3: Triton 4: Pine Island 5: Kasson 6: "Perfect School"

COMPARING
I wanted to see if there were certain gifts of certain schools when it came to each tests, so I used this graph to compare the math and reading scores of each school. On average, the students in all of the schools scored better on their reading tests than their math tests. Some schools like Byron and Kasson have scores that are closer to each other, while, say Stewartville has scores on totally different ends of the spectrum.

Key: 1: Byron 2: Stewartville 3: Triton 4: Pine Island 5: Kasson 6: "Perfect School"

COLLEGE READINESS
Another factor that I thought was even more important than the standardized tests was college readiness. As far as this goes, bar 6 represents the average of most bigger schools. These schools have more AP classes to take, so it is not completely accurate, but I just wanted a scale at which to compare the smaller towns. Most of them are in the 20-30 range with a few exceptions. Ranking: In order to rank the schools, I took each of the 3 areas and ranked them from 1 to 5, 1 being the school with the best scores, 5 being the worst. I took those numbers and added them all together and then averaged them out. After doing that, this is what I came up with: 1: Byron, 2: Stewartville, 3: Kasson, 4: Pine Island, 5: Triton

Key: 1: Byron 2: Stewartville 3: Triton 4: Pine Island 5: Kasson 6: "Perfect School"

CRIME!

One factor I thought would be important in ranking towns was crime rates. I used property crime rates because they were the most common. This graph shows the number of crimes per 1,000 people. As it turns out, all of the suburbs of Rochester that I sampled were exactly the same as the state average. Although I thought it would be a good statistic to compare, crime rates actually have little value when it comes to setting the towns apart from each other because they are all the same. If we were comparing this to a bigger city though, say Minneapolis, it would be a huge factor. Minneapolis has 51.21 property crimes per 1,000 people, which is twice the amount of property crimes that are seen in the suburbs of Rochester.

HOUSE VALUES
In order to find how each of the towns compared to the state average, I found the z-scores of each of them. Byron: -.20 Stewartville: -1.62 Triton: -2.12 Pine Island: .23 Kasson: -1.50 I was surprised to find that most of the houses in these towns were below the average cost of houses in the state. My data is somewhat skewed though, because one super expensive house could totally throw off the mean.
Key: 1: Byron 2: Stewartville 3: Triton 4: Pine Island 5: Kasson 6: State Average

In order to buy a house, there must be houses for you to buy. I looked at the averages houses for sale per 100 people. So I used the total population to help in this. Clearly, Pine Island wins this one with the most houses for sale. That may be because there is not as much of a demand for houses there and because the price is high (see previous slide).

Key: 1: Byron 2: Stewartville 3: Triton 4: Pine Island 5: Kasson

CONCLUSIONS
Although I was really hoping to have a solid answer on which town was best after getting all of this information, I really didnt. There isnt one that stands out, although there are definitely certain towns that are more gifted at things than others. What I did do, though, was took all of the rankings that I came up with and averaged them out. My Predictions: 1: Byron 2: Stewartville 3: Kasson 4: Pine Island 5: Triton Reality:

1. Byron 2. Kasson and Pine Island 4. Stewartville

Byron Rocks