The top reported proficiency rate is 18% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Mckittrick Elementary
McKittrick Elementary is the single school in a very small, isolated K-through-8 district in the oil fields of western Kern County. It serves the community of McKittrick, an unincorporated settlement at the junction of State Routes 33 and 58, roughly a half-hour drive from Bakersfield. The surrounding landscape is arid and dominated by oil and gas operations; publicly reported accounts describe oil pumping units visible from the school's basketball court and note that a governor's press conference on a local oil spill was once held on school grounds. Families who land here typically come for oil-field employment, and the school is one of the very few community anchors in town, alongside a fire station, a mini-mart, and a cafe that serves largely as a lunch stop for oil workers.
The school is very small for a K-8 institution, with enrollment spread thinly across nine grade levels. Because so few students sit in any given grade, California's testing rules require suppressing most grade-level results to protect student privacy, so a comprehensive picture of academic performance is not available from state assessments alone. The one grade where results were reported for the most recent school year shows a low share of students reaching proficiency in both English language arts and math. Looking across all tested grades combined, the school's overall proficiency index places it in the bottom quartile relative to districts in Kern County. These are numbers a parent should weigh honestly, and it would be reasonable to ask the school directly about instructional supports, how it monitors individual student progress, and what resources are available given the small staff.
Trends are essentially unknowable from the data in hand: only a single year of results exists in the dataset, so there is no way to characterize whether performance is improving, stable, or declining. Chronic absenteeism and graduation rate data were not available for this school. Information on special education services and English learner supports was also absent from the data, so families with children who need those services should ask the school specifically what it can offer.
On the program side, the school has publicly implemented transitional kindergarten as part of California's statewide universal-TK rollout, which means families with young children have an early-entry option. Because the district is classified in a category that does not receive additional state funding for the mandate, it has absorbed the cost within existing resources, reportedly running a combined TK and kindergarten classroom with an aide. That arrangement can work well, but it is worth asking the school how the program is staffed and structured in any given year, since resource constraints at this scale can shift.
The community itself is declining rather than growing. Publicly reported population figures show a downward trend across multiple census counts, and recent estimates put the current population quite low. Housing is described as a small cluster of houses and mobile homes, with most residents renting. There is no housing market activity data available in the dataset, and no major new development was found in research. Families considering a move here are likely coming because of an employer, not because of a housing opportunity or a school reputation that draws people from outside the area.
What this school offers is intimacy and accessibility that a large district cannot replicate. Every child in town attends the same building from kindergarten through eighth grade. Staff almost certainly know every student by name. The tradeoff is limited breadth: peer groups are tiny, elective options are constrained by size, and the path to high school will require leaving the district entirely. For a family already embedded in McKittrick's oil-field economy, the school is the community's school in the most literal sense. For a family weighing whether to relocate here, the academic performance data and the school's resource constraints deserve a direct conversation before committing.
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