Original Research by School Decision on Pingree-buchanan 10
Pingree-Buchanan 10 is a small public school district in rural North Dakota, serving students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade across two schools: an elementary building and a high school. The enrollment is very small, with only a handful of students per grade level, which is typical of districts in this part of the state. The student body is predominantly white, with a small number of students from other racial backgrounds. The district did not report free-or-reduced-price lunch figures, English learner counts, or special education rates in the data we received, so it is hard to gauge the full economic and support-service picture from what is available. A parent wanting to understand those dimensions would need to ask the district directly.
The district sits in Stutsman County, with housing data drawing from nearby Jamestown and Carrington zip codes. Home values in the area run well below both the North Dakota state benchmark and the national one, making this an affordable place to buy relative to broader markets. Rents are also modest. The estimated monthly mortgage on a typical home in the area is higher than typical rent, which reflects current mortgage rate conditions, but both housing costs and rent-to-income ratios remain low compared with national figures. No locale brief was provided, so we cannot speak to the specific character of the towns the district serves or recent community developments. The district brief search turned up little of lasting impact, so there are no recent district-level changes to report.
On state assessments, North Dakota administered the A-PLUS test in the most recent year, and the data comes to us as proficiency ranges rather than exact percentages. The state also changed the assessment name and cut scores, which means year-to-year trend comparisons are not reliable and we have left them aside. In English language arts, the range for third and fourth grades sits in a lower band, while fifth grade lands in a high band and eighth grade in a solid mid-to-upper band. Seventh grade falls in a middle range. The pattern suggests that the upper elementary and middle school ELA results are comparatively strong, while the earliest tested grades are weaker. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, especially to understand how reading instruction in the primary grades is structured.
Math results are mixed. Third and seventh grades fall in a lower range, fourth and fifth grades land in middle bands, and eighth grade sits in a lower range as well. Science was tested in only two grades, with fourth grade in a middle range and eighth grade in a lower band. Participation rates were consistent across all tested grades and subjects. Because the proficiency figures are reported as ranges and the tested counts are missing, a parent reading these results should treat them as a general sense of where the district stands rather than a precise measure. Small districts can see large swings in results from year to year simply because each grade has so few students, and a single child's performance can shift the profile considerably.
Graduation rate data was not provided, nor were course access details, staffing figures, attendance rates, discipline data, or program offerings. For a district this small, some of those fields may simply not be reported in the same way larger districts report them, or the data may not have been collected in the sources we drew from. We looked for information on Advanced Placement, dual-credit, career pathways, and other program offerings but found none listed, so we left that out rather than guess. A family considering this district would benefit from asking directly about what high school coursework and extracurriculars are available, since the data does not describe them.
What the picture does show is a very small, rural, affordable district with mixed academic results across grades, stronger in some upper elementary and middle school ELA outcomes and softer in early elementary and some middle school math and science. The housing market is accessible. The data gaps are broad enough that a family would want to supplement this account with direct conversations with district staff, particularly around academic support, high school programming, and student services.
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