Freeport

  The Freeport School District is rolling out more personal standardized tests. 

The new assessment is known as the Measures of Academic Progress Test, and is adaptive.  Unlike the ISAT and PARCC, it  adjusts the difficulty of questions in real time based on students answers.  This means if a student is doing well, they'll receive harder questions, while if they're performing poorly, the questions will get easier.  

Officials hope the progress test, or MAP, can provide more accurate student metrics as it’s given several times per year. 

Freeport’s mayor and council are at odds over the city’s legal department. Mayor Jim Gitz on Monday vetoed a council measure to end the department and outsource its services.

Mayor Gitz says the Council did not give a good explanation of why the measure was a good idea, or even why it was needed.   According to the Freeport Journal-Standard, Gitz also says the ordinance was being used to interfere with the work of the mayor.  

Criminal charges have been filed against a Freeport-area woman after 143 cats and dogs were seized Monday from her home. Many of them were dead. 

Tina McKinnon, 45, is charged with two counts of aggravated cruelty to animals, plus three misdemeanor charges. Officials say they had been trying to find her home after she reached out to animal control and another local animal rescue organization for help with all of the animals, only to back away.  

Bus ridership has nearly doubled in Freeport and Stephenson County in the first six months following service expansion. 

Kevin Cooley, the program compliance oversight monitor at the Freeport senior center, is confident ridership will continue to increase. 

“We’re already well over 30,000 rides--we’ve already pretty much completed everything we did last fiscal year and we have the whole year to go,” Cooley said.