The top reported proficiency rate is 26% in English language arts. The lowest is 12% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Kuumba Academy Charter School
Kuumba Academy Charter School is a single-school charter district in New Castle County, Delaware, serving kindergarten through eighth grade. The enrollment is moderate for a K-8 charter, with students spread across the grade levels in fairly even bands. The student body is overwhelmingly Black, with small Hispanic and multiracial populations, and a handful of American Indian or Alaska Native students. White and Asian enrollment is negligible. The school does not report free-or-reduced-price lunch counts, nor does it share IEP or English-learner figures, so a family relying on those indicators to gauge the level of concentrated need or special-education services will find those data absent. This is a gap worth raising directly with the school.
On state assessments, the results are a clear soft spot. In math, across grades three through eight on the Smarter Balanced assessment, proficiency is very low and has been for several years. The trend shows modest movement up and down over time, with the most recent year dipping back to near where it started. English language arts is better than math but still sits below the midpoint among New Castle County's districts. ELA proficiency has been largely flat over the past several years, hovering in a narrow band without meaningful improvement or decline. Science proficiency is also low. Social studies, reported by grade level, varies widely: fourth graders and eighth graders perform at a noticeably higher level than sixth graders, whose proficiency drops sharply. A parent may want to look into what drives that middle-grade dip and what the school is doing about it.
Placed against its county peers, Kuumba Academy's overall proficiency index falls below the midpoint among New Castle County's districts. Chronic absenteeism sits close to the county median, roughly in line with neighboring districts rather than standing out as a particular problem. Per-pupil current spending is in the upper range compared with other districts in the county, which suggests the school is putting resources behind its students even as the academic outcomes have not yet reflected that investment. There is no graduation rate to report because the school does not serve high school grades, and that metric simply does not apply here.
The school operates as a charter district with a single campus, and no program offerings, course-access details, staffing data, discipline data, or attendance breakdowns were provided in the available material. The same is true for civil-rights reporting. Without these, it is hard to characterize the school's academic pathways, extracurricular breadth, or climate beyond what the test results and demographic profile show. A family considering Kuumba Academy would want to ask the school directly about its curriculum, instructional approach, supports for struggling learners, and any enrichment or arts programming, since none of that appears in the data.
No locale brief or housing information was available for the school's surrounding community, so there is little here to describe the neighborhood context, housing market, or commute patterns a family might weigh. The district brief also carried no parent-relevant changes, so there are no recent shifts, expansions, leadership changes, or strategic initiatives to report. Publicly reported material on the school's direction or recent priorities was not part of what we received.
What the available picture does convey is a small, community-rooted charter school serving a nearly all-Black student population, spending at a high level relative to its county peers, but producing state test results that are persistently weak in math and science and below the county midpoint in English. ELA has been stable but stagnant. The school's strengths, if they lie outside state test performance, are not visible in this data. For a parent, the right questions are whether the school's culture, relationships, or programs offer something the numbers do not capture, and what the plan is to move math and science outcomes off the floor they have occupied for years.
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