Original Research by School Decision on Lewis and Clark 161
Lewis and Clark 161 is a small, rural North Dakota district serving students from prekindergarten through twelfth grade. It spans communities in Ward County, with brick-and-mortar schools in Berthold and Plaza, and two virtual schools listed as future additions. The enrollment is modest, with roughly two dozen to three dozen students per grade level, which creates a close-knit setting where families and staff tend to know one another across the years.
The student body is predominantly white, with a meaningful American Indian and Alaska Native presence and a smaller Hispanic cohort. A handful of students identify as two or more races, and there are one or two students in other categories. The district does not report free-or-reduced-price lunch figures, IEP rates, or English learner data in the materials we reviewed, so we cannot characterize the economic need profile or the special-population share from what is available. A parent wanting that picture would need to ask the district directly.
On state assessments, Lewis and Clark uses North Dakota's A-PLUS test, and the most recent results are from the current school year. The state flagged that the assessment name and proficiency cut scores changed, which means these results are not cleanly comparable to prior years. Any year-over-year trend reading would be unreliable, so the data stands on its own as a snapshot rather than a trajectory.
In that snapshot, math proficiency is mixed across grade levels. The middle elementary grades land in a lower-to-mid range, with fifth and sixth grade showing noticeably stronger results, then proficiency dips again in seventh and eighth. English language arts follows a similar pattern, with sixth grade the clear bright spot and eighth grade sitting at the lower end of the range. Science results are limited to two tested grades. Fourth-grade science falls in a middle range, while eighth-grade science is quite low. Participation rates are generally solid, though one grade in ELA dipped below the others. The weaker eighth-grade results in both ELA and science are something a parent may want to look into further with the school, particularly as students prepare for the transition to high school.
The district operates four open schools: Berthold Elementary, Berthold High School, North Shore Plaza Elementary, and North Shore Plaza High School. Two virtual schools, one elementary and one high school, are listed as future additions, suggesting the district is exploring remote options, though we have no details on timeline or program design. We looked for information on curriculum changes, budget priorities, bond measures, or new programs and found little in the available research, so we left that out rather than guess.
Housing in the district's attendance area sits above the North Dakota state benchmark but below the national one. The weighted typical home value draws from several ZIP codes, with Berthold carrying the largest contribution, and smaller inputs from Minot and Burlington. Rents in the area are modest relative to a typical mortgage payment, which means renting is notably less expensive than buying at current rates. Home values in the Berthold area have been roughly flat year over year, while the Minot-area ZIP codes that feed the district have seen somewhat stronger appreciation. The broader economy shows a national unemployment rate holding steady, and mortgage rates remain elevated by recent historical standards, which continues to shape what families can afford.
No graduation rate, civil-rights reporting, course-access data, staffing figures, or discipline data were available for this district in the materials provided. For a district this size, some of those gaps may reflect reporting thresholds or the way small districts are handled in state and federal data systems, but we cannot confirm a specific reason. A family evaluating Lewis and Clark for a high schooler would want to ask the district directly about graduation outcomes, advanced course offerings, and postsecondary pathways, since none of that appears in the available record.
What the data does show is a very small, rural, predominantly white district with a stable housing market and mixed academic results that improve in the upper elementary grades before softening in middle school. The planned virtual schools hint at an appetite for program expansion. Families drawn to small class sizes and a rural community setting will find the basic outline here, but they will need to go to the district for the fuller picture that the public data does not yet provide.
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