Original Research by School Decision on Valley-edinburg 118
Valley-Edinburg 118 is a small rural district in Pembina County, North Dakota, serving students from prekindergarten through twelfth grade across three schools. The buildings sit in Crystal, Edinburg, and Hoople, with Valley-Edinburg High School serving the upper grades and two elementary campuses, one in Crystal and one in Hoople, handling the lower grades. The district brief turned up no recent referenda, curriculum overhauls, property-tax shifts, or other lasting parent-relevant changes, so the district appears to be operating in a steady state rather than mid-transition.
The student body is small, with each grade cohort numbering in the low double digits at most. This is a district where a single class can shift the proficiency picture from year to year, and the state reports proficiency as ranges rather than point estimates, which reflects those small numbers. The enrollment is predominantly white, with a Hispanic minority and a small number of American Indian or Alaska Native students. Data on free or reduced-price lunch, special education populations, and English learners was not available, so the economic and special-needs profile of the district cannot be characterized from what was provided.
On the current North Dakota A-PLUS assessment, results vary widely by grade and subject. In English language arts, the early grades are the strongest, with third grade showing a large majority of students reaching proficiency. Middle-grade ELA holds reasonably well, with seventh and eighth grade landing in a solid mid-range. Math tells a more uneven story. Third grade starts strong, but fourth and fifth grade proficiency drops sharply, with the lower bound of the reported range touching near zero in some cases. Seventh grade math recovers to a mid-range, and eighth grade lands in a moderate band. Science was tested only in fourth and eighth grade; fourth-grade science results fall in a very low range, while eighth-grade science is stronger. Because the state changed both the assessment name and the proficiency cut scores this year, these results cannot be cleanly compared to prior years, so no trend read is available.
Participation rates across tested grades sit in the eighty-to-ninety-percent range, which is on the lower side for state testing and worth noting. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, since consistent near-universal participation is typical for regular state assessments and the reported rates leave room for questions about who is and is not being tested.
The housing market in the communities this district serves is quite affordable relative to both state and national benchmarks. Typical home values across the district's zip codes run well below the North Dakota statewide figure and roughly half the national level, putting homeownership within reach for many households at the current price-to-income ratio. Rent data was not available. The nearest market centers appear to be Cavalier, Grafton, and Park River, each contributing to the district's housing picture. The region is flat, agricultural, and sparsely populated, which shapes the lifestyle: wide open space, long drives between services, and a tight-knit community identity built around the schools.
No graduation rate, course access, staffing, discipline, or program data was provided, so the high school experience cannot be assessed in detail from this dataset. Similarly, no comparison fact-set positioning Valley-Edinburg against neighboring Pembina County districts was available, so readers cannot see how it stacks up locally. What the data does show is a very small, stable rural district with affordable housing, uneven but at times strong elementary literacy results, a clear soft spot in upper-elementary math and fourth-grade science, and a student population too small to support fine-grained subgroup analysis. For a family drawn to rural Pembina County life, the district's intimate scale is its defining feature, and the gaps in the data reflect that scale as much as anything else.
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