The following is a brief of the full story. For the full version, see Tuesday's print edition of the Boonville Daily News.

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) now provides schools, as well as parents, the ability to view annual performance reports/report cards at their website.

“Legislature passed a law stating that every school district must submit/produce an annual report,” Jim Morris, public information officer for DESE explained. “In the initial law, responsibility was given to the school districts that annual reports had to be produced in some fashion. We operated that way for a number of years, then a few years ago, once the data was collected from the school districts, to make the format consistent for all, the reports were published online.”

Morris explained that while looking at one of the reports, a link to the statute is available so the text of the law, stating the requirements and why it’s needed can be read.

Some of the indicators that are required under federal law, have been added to the list of requirements for all school districts to submit, which has become somewhat of a burden to assemble all of the data for “people to make sense of,” Morris said.

State law (Section 160.522) requires DESE to publish an annual “report card” about each school district, each school building and each charter school. The reports provided below include all of the data required by state law, plus information required by federal law (No Child Left Behind).

The requirements consist of: total number of students enrolled in the school, graduation rate, drop out rate and where graduates go after they leave the school and many other categories of statistics.