The top reported proficiency rate is 76% in Science. The lowest is 54% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Union Public School Dist
Union Public School District sits in Newton County, Mississippi, and serves students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade across three schools: Union Elementary, Union Middle, and Union High. The enrollment is small for a full PK-through-12 district, with fairly even distribution across grade bands. The student body is predominantly white, with a substantial Black enrollment and very small representation from other racial and ethnic groups. The district does not report free-or-reduced-price lunch counts, special-education rates, or English-learner figures in the data available, so families seeking that context would need to go directly to the district.
On state assessments, the current academic year's results on the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program give a generally solid picture. In mathematics, a majority of students reach proficiency across every tested grade from third through eighth. Fourth grade stands out as particularly strong, and middle grades hold steady through sixth and seventh. Eighth-grade math dips below the rest, which is a pattern families might want to ask about when they visit the school. In English language arts, the district lands in a more mixed range. Most grades show a slight majority of students proficient, but seventh grade is a clear soft spot, with fewer than half reaching that bar. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, particularly if their child is entering those middle grades. Science results, by contrast, are a bright point. Both fifth and eighth grades show a strong majority of students proficient, which suggests the district's science instruction is landing well.
The district does not have multi-year trend data available, so it is not possible to say from the provided information whether these results represent improvement, decline, or stability over time. Participation rates for the assessments were also not reported.
No graduation rate data was provided for the district, even though Union High School serves grades nine through twelve and such a measure would normally apply. The absence may reflect reporting timing or data availability, but families with high school students should ask the district directly for the most recent graduation and college-readiness figures. Similarly, no information was available on advanced-course offerings, career or technical pathways, dual-credit opportunities, staffing ratios, discipline data, or attendance patterns. These are areas where a family would benefit from a direct conversation with school leadership.
The housing market in the district's area is modest by any standard. Home values are well below both the Mississippi state benchmark and the national one, and the district-weighted index has declined modestly over the past year. The price-to-income ratio sits below the national level, which points to relative affordability for working families. Most of the district's housing stock is concentrated in a single ZIP code, with small contributions from the Conehatta and Decatur areas. Rent data was not available. The broader economic context shows a national unemployment rate holding steady, and a thirty-year mortgage rate environment that remains elevated by recent historical standards, which affects what buyers can stretch to even in an affordable market.
We looked for recent district-level changes such as bond measures, curriculum shifts, construction projects, or property-tax adjustments that would matter to parents, and found nothing that cleared a lasting-impact threshold. No locale brief was available for the specific community or communities the district serves, so we left that out rather than guess.
What the picture supports is a small, rural district where elementary and middle-grade math and science instruction are producing results that exceed what many comparable districts achieve, while English language arts has room to grow, especially in the middle grades. The housing is affordable. The gaps in available data, particularly around graduation, advanced coursework, and student-support services, are real enough that a family weighing this district should treat a direct call to the central office as a necessary next step.
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