The top reported proficiency rate is 40% in English language arts. The lowest is 34% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Green Forest Elementary School
Green Forest Elementary School serves young students from prekindergarten through third grade in the Green Forest School District, a small, rural district in Carroll County in northwest Arkansas. As the entry point for the district’s youngest learners, the school sits within a community shaped by agriculture and a major poultry processing plant, which anchors the local economy and contributes to the town’s notable demographic diversity for the region. A substantial share of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the economic profile of many families in the area.
The school is a mid-sized elementary for its grade span. Its student body is composed of roughly equal shares of white students and Hispanic or Latino students, with a smaller but notable Asian student population and a handful of students identifying as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. This composition mirrors the town’s broader workforce, and the school environment is one where families from a range of backgrounds send their children. Information on the share of students who are English learners or receive special education services was not available, which is a gap a parent may want to explore directly with the district.
State testing data is available only for third graders, as the earlier grades are not assessed under Arkansas’s current system. On the ATLAS assessments, the school’s third graders recorded proficiency rates that, when averaged across math, English language arts, and science, placed the school below the midpoint among the three districts in Carroll County. For a parent reading this, the numbers show that many third graders are not yet meeting the state’s proficient benchmark. That said, the school serves only the early primary years, and these results capture a single grade and a single point in time. Families considering the school may want to ask how the school supports early literacy and foundational math skills and how it tracks student growth before the testing years.
Because the school ends at third grade, there is no graduation rate, chronic absenteeism data, or course access data to report. Those metrics pertain to secondary schools and are not applicable here.
The housing market in the area shows home values close to the state’s median, and the cost of a typical mortgage is manageable relative to national benchmarks, though wage data for the immediate town was not available for direct comparison. The town has seen steady population growth over recent decades, but detailed information on new housing developments was not found in the available sources, so whether that growth is translating into new subdivisions or tighter supply is an open question for a prospective resident.
Green Forest itself is a compact, vehicle-dependent town. The downtown square hosts local businesses, and the city park with its soccer and baseball fields and a restored train station provides a central recreational anchor. The public library opened in recent years and is a branch of a two-county system. Community life revolves around events like the annual Appreciation Day celebrations.
For a parent, this school fits a family seeking a small-district elementary experience in a tight-knit, rural Arkansas town. The student body is more diverse than is typical for the region, and the economic reality is that a high proportion of families qualify for meal assistance. The test results offer a clear signal that academic proficiency in third grade is an area the school is working on, and the lack of detail on English learner and special education services is a piece a parent should follow up on. The school stops at third grade, so a family will need to plan for transitions to the district’s intermediate and upper-grade schools down the road.
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