Original Research by School Decision on Syringa Mountain School Inc.
Syringa Mountain School Inc. is a single-school charter district in Idaho, operating Syringa Mountain Charter School for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The district is based in Hailey. It is a small operation, with roughly a hundred students spread across nine grade levels, meaning each cohort is tight-knit. Class sizes at each grade level are small enough that a parent can expect their child to be known individually by staff.
The student body is predominantly white, with a smaller Hispanic population and a few students identifying as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and as two or more races. Data on free or reduced-price lunch eligibility was not reported, so we cannot speak to the economic mix of families from the available data. Similarly, information on students with individualized education programs and English learners was not available. A parent whose child needs specific support services may want to ask the school directly about what is offered and how it is staffed.
On academic performance, the picture is limited. The school administers the Idaho ISAT in math, English language arts, and science at the grades the state tests, but nearly every proficiency rate for the most recent year was either missing from the data or suppressed. Suppression at this scale typically reflects very small tested populations, and the tested counts here are indeed small per grade. This is a common pattern for tiny schools and charter districts, where privacy protections prevent the public release of results when only a handful of students sit for the exam. A parent looking for a clear read on academic outcomes from state testing will not find one in the available data. Asking the school for its own internal assessment results or progress reports would be a reasonable next step.
Because the district serves only through eighth grade, there is no graduation rate to report. That gap is explained by the grade band, not by any shortcoming. When students finish eighth grade, they move on to a high school elsewhere, and the district does not track or report a graduation figure.
We looked for the district's strategic priorities, recent curriculum changes, or other parent-relevant developments and found little in the available results. No specific property-tax, pedagogy, or program changes surfaced. No locale brief, housing data, community economic context, or neighbor comparison was available for this district, so we cannot describe the surrounding housing market or position the school against nearby districts. Information on discipline, course access, staffing ratios, and attendance was also absent.
What a parent can take from this is a portrait of a very small charter school in a mountain-town setting, where the defining feature is scale. The cohort sizes mean individual attention is built into the structure. The trade-off is that public academic data is too thin to judge proficiency from the outside. A family considering Syringa Mountain should plan to visit, talk with teachers and leadership, and ask for evidence of student growth that the state reports simply cannot provide for a school this size.
See more original research from School Decision →