The top reported proficiency rate is 62% in English language arts. The lowest is 56% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Sheridan County School District #3
Sheridan County School District #3 is a single-school rural district serving the area around Clearmont in Sheridan County, Wyoming. Its one campus, Clearmont K-12 School, carries every grade from kindergarten through twelfth under one roof, and the entire district enrolls only a few dozen students. Grade cohorts are tiny, with most tested grades having only a handful of students sitting for state assessments. That scale shapes almost everything about how a family should read the data here.
The district's state testing picture through the WY-TOPP assessment is genuinely mixed, and the small cohort sizes mean results swing sharply from grade to grade. In the upper elementary grades, proficiency in both math and English language arts runs strong, with most tested students clearing the proficiency bar. Eighth grade shows similarly high results in both subjects, and science proficiency in the tested grades lands in a moderate-to-solid range. The clearest soft spot is the middle grades, where both math and ELA proficiency drop off considerably. When only a small number of students are tested, a single year's results can look dramatic in either direction. A parent trying to judge academic quality from these numbers should treat them as a snapshot of a very small group rather than a stable trend line. Looking into year-to-year consistency with the school directly would give a clearer sense of whether the dips in the middle grades are persistent or a one-year artifact.
No graduation rate was available for this district, and free-or-reduced-price lunch data, special education rates, and English learner counts were all missing from the provided data. Those gaps are common for very small rural districts where reporting thresholds suppress figures to protect student privacy, so their absence should not be read as a sign that those populations do not exist.
The district operates on a four-day school week, as referenced on its official website. That schedule reshapes family routines, childcare needs, and weekly instructional time in ways a family should weigh carefully before committing. It is a structural feature of life here rather than a minor detail.
Among Sheridan County's districts, which is the comparison set used here, District #3 sits in the bottom quartile on an overall proficiency index and on chronic absenteeism. The absenteeism rate is elevated relative to its county peer, which a parent may want to look into further with the school to understand whether transportation, the four-day week, or other factors are driving it. At the same time, per-pupil current spending runs well above the county midpoint, which is typical for very small districts where fixed costs spread across few students.
The housing market around the district is shaped by two zip codes. The Clearmont area carries most of the weight in the district's weighted home value, and prices there sit well above the state and national benchmarks, with year-over-year growth outpacing both. The Sheridan zip, which contributes a smaller share, carries lower values. The district's price-to-income ratio is high, and estimated monthly mortgage costs reflect current mortgage rates that have hovered in the mid-six-percent range. Rent data was not available. Families considering a move here should expect a housing market that is more expensive than the state norm, concentrated in a rural area where inventory is thin.
Demographically, the student body is almost entirely white, with only a small number of students identifying as Hispanic or as two or more races. The district does not have the racial or ethnic diversity found in more populated areas, and that is a plain characteristic of the community rather than a judgment about it.
What this district offers is intimacy. Every adult in the building likely knows every student. Class sizes are as small as they come, and per-pupil resources are high. The tradeoffs are volatility in academic results driven by tiny cohorts, a four-day week that demands family flexibility, elevated absenteeism, and a housing market that may surprise families expecting rural Wyoming prices. For a family seeking a deeply personal K-12 environment in a rural setting and willing to work with the four-day schedule, this could be a strong fit. For families who want stable, large-cohort data or a conventional five-day week, the picture is more complicated.
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