The top reported proficiency rate is 50% in Science. The lowest is 30% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Beryozova School
Beryozova School sits on West Beryozova Drive in Palmer, Alaska, part of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District. It is listed as serving kindergarten through twelfth grade, though its enrolled students are concentrated in the elementary and middle grades, with no students currently in grades nine through twelve. The school is very small, and its rural address on a named drive rather than a downtown street suggests it sits outside Palmer's compact core.
The setting matters here. Palmer is a small city that blends residential life, working farms, and civic functions. It was founded as a New Deal planned agricultural colony, and it retains that heritage with operating farms and a planned downtown centered on a log cabin visitor center, public library, and train depot. It is the borough seat of Matanuska-Susitna Borough and hosts the annual Alaska State Fair. The broader Mat-Su Valley has grown rapidly over the past decade, and Palmer increasingly functions as a commuter community, with many residents driving to Anchorage for work. The town has a modest, seasonal street life concentrated downtown, with the Friday Fling market around the library and depot. Recreation nearby includes Matanuska Lakes and Finger Lake state recreation areas and Hatcher Pass to the north. This is a place where open land and agricultural roots still shape daily life, even as suburban growth presses in.
Beryozova's enrollment is tiny. Every enrolled student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is nearly entirely white, with a single student identified as American Indian or Alaska Native. Data on individualized education programs and English learners was not reported, so those populations cannot be characterized here. The school is not a charter or magnet school.
On state assessments, Beryozova's results come from the AK STAR test in math and English language arts and the ASA in science, all for grades three through eight. In both math and ELA, roughly three in ten tested students reached proficiency, with most of the eligible students participating. Science proficiency was higher, with about half of the small group tested reaching proficient levels. Because so few students sat for each assessment, results should be read with caution; a single student's performance shifts the picture considerably. No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say whether these results represent improvement, decline, or stability. No average scale scores were reported.
Because no students are enrolled in high school grades, there is no graduation rate to report. The school's listed grade span includes high school, but the current enrollment does not. No course access data, staffing figures, attendance rates, or discipline data were provided. Program offerings were not reported either, so families would need to contact the school directly to understand what is available beyond the core curriculum.
The parent district, Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, is a large borough-wide system. Publicly reported searches did not surface specific parent-relevant changes such as referenda, curriculum overhauls, or property-tax shifts in the district, so there is nothing to relay on that front.
What emerges is a picture of a very small, rural, high-poverty school serving a homogenous student population in a growing agricultural-to-commuter community. The proficiency results in math and ELA are modest, while science stands out as a relative bright spot, though all figures rest on small testing cohorts. A parent considering Beryozova would want to ask the school directly about class structure across grade levels, what happens when students reach high school age, and what support services are available given the universal free-or-reduced-price-lunch population.
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