The top reported proficiency rate is 65% in English language arts. The lowest is 26% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Lipscomb Elementary School
Lipscomb Elementary School serves kindergarten through fifth grade as part of the Jefferson County school system in a small, historically rooted city situated between Birmingham and Bessemer. The school sits in a community that has faced steep population decline, a municipal bankruptcy, and reduced city services in recent years. The housing market reflects this context: home values in the area are well below national and state medians, and rents are relatively modest. The school itself is a neighborhood elementary that draws almost entirely from the town it shares a name with.
The student body is majority Hispanic, with a substantial share of Black students and a small white population. A very large share of students come from families with low incomes, as measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price meals. The school is a regular public elementary, not a charter or magnet, and it does not serve grade levels that would produce a graduation rate or high school outcome metrics. State testing data from the most recent available year shows a mixed picture that improves across grade levels in reading. In math, third graders posted an above-the-midpoint result for their school, but by fourth and fifth grade fewer than half of students scored proficient. In English language arts, results improved steadily from a modest base in third grade to a strong outcome in fifth grade, where a clear majority of students demonstrated proficiency. Science results for fourth graders were lower, with only about one in four scoring proficient, a figure a parent may want to investigate further with the school given the district context.
When compared across districts in Jefferson County, the school's overall proficiency index lands above the midpoint of the county's districts. This is a useful marker for a family trying to understand where Lipscomb Elementary sits relative to other schools in the same system. The comparison set includes a wide range of performance, from low to very high, so being above the middle among that group is a reasonable signal that the school is not struggling across the board.
The district brief turned up no recent changes of lasting impact to note, so this is a stable institutional environment from the information available. Jefferson County is a large district, and Lipscomb Elementary is one of its smaller elementary schools. The city of Lipscomb itself offers limited civic infrastructure. There is no public library in town, no transit system, and the community is car-dependent, relying on nearby interstates and highways for access to Bessemer and Birmingham. City-organized events like an Easter egg hunt and a May Day celebration are the main civic anchors, alongside the school itself.
For a parent or resident evaluating this school, the picture is that of a small, economically stressed community anchored by an elementary school that posts uneven but improving reading results as students move up through the grades, with math performance that starts stronger in third grade and then drops. Science is an area of notable softness. The school does not serve grades that would produce high school outcome measures, so that is a gap that reflects the grade band rather than any failing. Families who value a very small, close-knit school setting serving a predominantly low-income and diverse population will find that here, while those weighing academic performance should look closely at the trajectory across grade levels within the school and probe the science and later-math results with the school directly. The broader Jefferson County district provides the administrative and curricular framework, but no recent district-level changes were identified that would shift the experience for students at this school.
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