Original Research by School Decision on Stanley 2
Stanley Public School District sits in Mountrail County, North Dakota, serving students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade across two schools: Stanley Elementary School and Stanley High School. The district draws from the Stanley and Berthold communities, with housing values that run below the state benchmark and well below the national one. Home values in the Stanley area are lower than those in the Berthoid area, and the district's weighted home value has grown at a modest year-over-year pace. By national standards, the price-to-income ratio suggests a relatively affordable housing market compared with many parts of the country. Rental data was not available for the district.
The student body is predominantly white, with a sizable Hispanic presence that represents the second-largest group. Small numbers of students identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or two or more races. Enrollment is distributed fairly evenly across grade levels, giving the district a balanced footprint from early childhood through senior year. Information on free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, special education rates, and English learner status was not reported in the data we received, so we cannot speak to those dimensions of the student population.
State assessment results come from North Dakota's A-PLUS assessment for the current school year. A change in both the assessment name and the cut scores means that year-over-year trend comparisons are not available; the state has essentially reset the baseline. With that context in mind, the current results paint a mixed picture.
In English language arts, proficiency across grades three through eight sits in a moderate band, with roughly a third to nearly half of students meeting the proficient threshold in most grades. Seventh grade emerges as the relative bright spot in ELA. The results are fairly consistent across the grade span, without dramatic swings, though they also indicate that a majority of students are not yet reaching proficiency.
Mathematics tells a more uneven story. Third and fourth grade proficiency is low, with only a small fraction of students reaching the proficient level. Fifth grade stands out as a clear bright spot, where a majority of students are proficient. Sixth grade holds at a moderate level, roughly half. But proficiency drops sharply in seventh grade and falls further in eighth grade, where very few students are proficient. Eighth grade math is the district's weakest result by a wide margin. Science results, available for fourth and eighth grade, fall in a low to moderate range, with eighth grade again the softer of the two.
Participation rates across all tested grades and subjects are strong, mostly in the mid-ninety-percent range, which means the results reflect nearly the full student body rather than a selective subset. Still, given the assessment change, parents may want to treat these results as a new starting point rather than a trend, and the eighth grade math figure in particular is something a family might want to discuss with the school directly.
Beyond academics, the data is thin. We looked for information on course access, staffing, discipline, attendance, Title I status, and school locale classification, and none was available in the provided records. Program offerings such as advanced coursework, career and technical education, or dual-credit pathways were not reported. No graduation rate data was included. We also searched for recent district-level changes that parents might care about and found little of lasting impact in publicly reported sources. Civil rights data was not available either.
What the available picture does tell a family is this: Stanley is a small-to-mid-size rural district with a stable community footprint and affordable housing. Its ELA results are steady if unremarkable, and its math results show real strength in the upper elementary grades alongside a serious drop-off by middle school. For a family considering the district, the most productive next step would be asking school leaders how they are responding to the eighth grade math results and what the transition into high school looks like for students who arrive below grade level.
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