The top reported proficiency rate is 69% in Science. The lowest is 38% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on El Capitan Public School
El Capitan Public School is the single public school serving Colorado City, a small and remote town in the Arizona Strip, the part of Mohave County that lies north of the Grand Canyon. The school covers all secondary grades from sixth through twelfth, operating as a regular public school within the Colorado City Unified District. With a total enrollment that is small for a school serving this grade band, this is an intimate setting where most students are likely to know one another.
The student body is overwhelmingly White, with a very small number of American Indian or Alaska Native students and a trace of Hispanic and multiracial students. Data on the share of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the standard poverty proxy across Arizona, was not available in the records we examined. Similarly, no information on students with disabilities or English learners was reported. This means a parent cannot evaluate the school’s resource allocation or support programs from the civil rights data alone; a call to the school to ask about special education staffing and services for English learners would be a straightforward next step.
State assessment results present an incomplete picture. The Arizona academic assessment, known as the AASA, was administered to students in grades six, seven, and eight. For math in all three grades, the state suppressed the proficiency data, meaning the values were not reported publicly; the school’s own district or state authorities can likely explain why. For English language arts, the sixth grade result showed that a modest share of students met the proficient threshold. Seventh and eighth grade ELA results were also suppressed. In science, which Arizona tests in grade eight using the AzSci assessment, a larger share of students scored proficient or above compared to what the overall proficiency index for the school suggests. That overall proficiency index, which averages results across tested subjects and grades, places the school above the midpoint among the districts in Mohave County. That is a position of relative strength within the county, though readers should remember that the comparison set includes only the handful of Mohave County districts for which data was available and that several grade-level results were not reported.
The school has only one year of proficiency data in the trend series, so no direction of improvement or decline can be assessed. No high school graduation rate was available, which is not unusual if the school does not yet report a four-year rate that meets the state’s standards for public reporting, or if the data was suppressed for a small graduating class. A parent should confirm directly with the school whether a graduation rate is published.
Colorado City itself is a small residential town with a young population. Housing consists largely of single-family homes, and home values are in line with the national average while having risen appreciably over the past year. The economy is driven by construction, education and health care, manufacturing, and retail. The school district is the largest single employer in town, which means the school is tightly woven into the local economy and community life. The town experienced a steep population decline over the past decade and a half, followed by a slight recovery, and the community is in a period of transition. The town council has publicly stated goals of improving infrastructure and attracting families to stay. The nearest hospital is across the state line in St. George, Utah, about a long drive away.
There are no publicly reported recent district changes such as bond measures, boundary shifts, or curriculum overhauls that would affect a parent’s decision. The school building and the town hall are centrally located, and the two public school recreation centers function as community facilities.
What this school offers is a small, unified secondary experience in a remote community that is working to redefine itself. The academic picture is fragmentary in the data, but the science result suggests that at least some grade levels are holding their own against county peers. A family considering relocation to Colorado City should expect a setting where the school and the town are essentially one, with all the closeness and limitations that implies.
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