Original Research by School Decision on James D Price School
James D Price School is a regular public elementary school in the Yuma Elementary District, serving children in preschool through fifth grade. It is located in a residential area of Yuma on Barranca Road. The school is small. Because it serves only early elementary grades and preschool, the standard markers that many parents look for at the high school level—a graduation rate, advanced coursework, career pathways—simply do not apply here. They are not missing data; they are features that belong to a different grade band.
State testing results for the most recent school year were suppressed, which means the reported numbers of students tested were too small to release publicly under state privacy rules. Statistically reliable proficiency information is not available from the state for that year. However, a multi-year trend record shows that the school’s own internal reading and math proficiency rates, when they were reportable, clustered around the middle of the scale. In reading the figure was in the lower half of the range, and in math it was in the upper half of the range, based on data from two points. With data suppressed in the most recent year, a parent would need to ask the school directly for its current classroom-level performance picture. The absence of a comparison to other Yuma County schools is simply because the proficiency index could not be calculated with suppressed results.
The student body is about evenly split between children who identify as Hispanic and those who identify as white, with small numbers of Asian, Black, and multiracial students. The poverty indicator, the share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, was not reported. Similarly, counts of students with disabilities and English learners were not available. A parent who wants to know the school’s full support profile should ask for those numbers directly.
The school sits within Yuma, a city where the economy runs on agriculture, the Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma Proving Ground, and the trucking logistics that move goods across the nearby borders with California and Mexico. Yuma is a sprawling, car-dependent city outside its historic downtown. The housing market in the local ZIP code shows home values and rents that are below the state average. For a family buying a home, monthly mortgage costs would be roughly in line with the area’s median household income; the rent-to-income ratio suggests a manageable but not trivial share of income going to housing.
The district itself, Yuma Elementary District, showed no major recent changes that turned up in public reporting. It operates a number of elementary schools across the city, and Price is one of its smaller sites. For a family whose child is entering kindergarten or an early primary grade, the school offers a setting where class groups are small and the building serves only younger children. The trade-off is that the publicly available assessment data is thin enough that a parent cannot easily compare academic performance against other schools from the state numbers alone, and demographics and student supports are not fully described in the public record. A direct conversation with the principal and a school tour would fill the gaps that the data leaves open.
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