Stacey Day Returns to Mercer County as Deputy Superintendent After Four Years Leading West Central

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Stacey Day is the new deputy superintendent of Mercer County^↗ School District 404 in Aledo, the district where she taught, where she ran the high school, and which she left four years ago to become superintendent of West Central. "I officially made the transition back to Mercer County on July 1," she wrote in written answers to The ILEdTribune.

Asked what she wanted to do first, she named the thing an outside hire could not. "For me, my initial priorities are spending some time learning about what's changed (and maybe what's the same) since I left four years ago," Day wrote.

Some of that answer is already on the public record. On the Illinois State Board of Education's fall enrollment count, the district enrolled 1,283 students in 2021-22, Day's last year in the building, and 1,218 students in 2025-26, the most recent year the state has published. That is 65 fewer students, a decline of 5.1 percent across four school years, against a statewide decline of 2.9 percent on the same count over exactly the same span. Whatever else changed in her absence, the district got smaller faster than the state did.

Most of that loss came in one year. The fall count rose in two of the four years Day was away, then fell by 56 students in 2025-26, the largest one-year drop on that count since the state began publishing it for 2020-21. That year belongs to the record she says she wants to read.

Nineteen years, then four away

Day's account of how she got here is straightforward, and she gives the dates herself. "I started my career as a high school math teacher at Westmer School District in 2003," she wrote. "Then we consolidated in 2009-2010 with Aledo to create Mercer County and I continued teaching high school math. I became the high school principal during the 2013-2014 school year and was in that position until 2022. Then I moved to West Central #235 as a Superintendent for the last four years."

That makes her a product of the consolidation she now helps administer. "Mercer County was my home for 19 years," she wrote, and the sentence she wrote next is the one that explains the return: "Coming back to Mercer County feels like coming back home."

She was more specific than nostalgia. "It's a District that has a special place in my heart and when I left in 2022 I remember telling my staff that I would always be a Golden Eagle in my heart," she wrote.

The district she came back to

The state's longer record is its annual report card count, which runs through 2024-25 and counts students a little differently from the fall count, so the two are kept apart here. On the report card, Mercer County School District 404 went from 1,387 students in 2014-15 to 1,250 in 2024-25, a loss of 137 students and 9.9 percent. Illinois lost 10.0 percent over the same years. On the fall count, the district's 1,218 students in 2025-26 ranked 319th of 859 Illinois districts by enrollment.

Read year by year, the report card path is less tidy than a 9.9 percent figure suggests. The state has published 10 reporting years for this district in that span, with nine comparisons between them, and three of those nine are gains, the largest a 20-student rise in 2024-25. The longest unbroken run of declines is three. Illinois published no report card enrollment file for 2017-18, so the trend line above breaks there rather than drawing a segment across a year the state never reported.

Those students are spread across five buildings. Mercer County High School enrolled 382 students in 2025-26, Apollo Elem School 332, Mercer County Jr High School 284, New Boston Elem School 160, and the district's Early Learning Center 60. The five building counts reconcile exactly to the district total.

Where the arithmetic gets specific

The grade spine is where an enrollment number turns into a staffing decision. In 2025-26 the four high school grades enrolled 382 students. Kindergarten through third grade, the four youngest school grades, enrolled 318. That is a gap of 64 students between the top of the building sequence and the bottom.

Two cautions belong with that. These are different cohorts counted in the same year, not the same children followed forward, and in a district this size a single grade can swing hard for ordinary reasons: first grade enrolled 101 students in 2025-26 while kindergarten enrolled 68 and second grade 75. A district can and does refill its lower grades through move-ins. But the direction is the same one the four-year enrollment record shows, and it is visible in the buildings before it is visible in a budget.

Who is in the seats

These figures are a 2025-26 snapshot, not a change since Day left. The same fall count put the district's economically disadvantaged students at 631 in 2024-25 and 427 in 2025-26, a one-year swing too large to read as a change in who enrolled without the state accounting for it, so no trend is drawn from it here. The snapshot is where the district's planning starts.

In 2025-26, 427 students in the district, 35.1 percent, were classified as economically disadvantaged. The statewide share that year was 47.5 percent. Special education runs the other way: 255 students, 20.9 percent of enrollment, received special education services, against 16.8 percent statewide. The state's count also included 22 students who were homeless, 1.8 percent of enrollment. Those service categories overlap one another and overlap race and ethnicity, so their shares cannot be added together.

A special education share above the state's alongside an economic-disadvantage share below it is a specific staffing profile, and it is not the one a headline enrollment number implies. Illinois published no English learner count for the district that year, so no share is available for that group and none is estimated here.

By race and ethnicity, the published 2025-26 categories were 1,116 white students, or 91.6 percent of enrollment, 47 multiracial students, 21 Black students, 21 Hispanic students and 10 Asian students. Three further categories have no published count. The published categories account for 99.8 percent of enrollment.

The first year

Day put people ahead of programs in her account of the fall. "I know many of the staff and Board members, but I don't know all of them, so I'm hoping to have some time early on to meet everyone and get to know them," she wrote. She framed the opening months around what is already working: "My focus to start the year is reminding everyone of all of the great things that are happening at Mercer County."

She did not describe that as the whole job. "We've got some work to do, but I'm excited to see staff and students back in our buildings in less than a month!" she wrote in July.

The work is legible enough in the record. A district of this size does not get to absorb 137 fewer students across a decade of report card counts, and 56 fewer in a single fall, without deciding something about sections, buildings and staff, and the 64-student gap between the high school grades and the youngest grades is the version of that decision that arrives first. Day ran the building those cohorts arrive in until 2022. The question her first year answers is what the district does with a record she already knows how to read.

Enrollment, grade, school and student-group figures come from the Illinois State Board of Education: its annual report card count (2014-15 through 2024-25; no 2017-18 file) and its fall enrollment count (2020-21 through 2025-26). The two count students differently, so every comparison here stays within one of them. The 2025-26 grade, school and student-group figures are from the fall count; 2026-27 counts are not yet published and will differ. Mrs. Day's quotations come from written answers she sent in July 2026.