Original Research by School Decision on Midway Elementary
Midway Elementary sits on F Street in Fellows, a small unincorporated community in western Kern County surrounded on all sides by the Midway-Sunset Oil Field. The school is the only one in the Midway Elementary School District and carries students from kindergarten through eighth grade, making it the sole institutional anchor of a child's entire pre-high school experience in this community. When students finish eighth grade, they leave Fellows for high school, with the nearest option publicly reported to be a continuation school some distance away near Taft.
The enrollment is quite small, even by the standards of rural elementary schools. Every grade from kindergarten through eighth holds just a handful of students, meaning class sizes are intimate and teachers likely know each child well. The student body is predominantly white, with Hispanic students forming the next largest group and a few students of other backgrounds. A substantial share of the student population qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, placing this among schools that serve a higher-need economic population.
State assessment results for the most recent school year are available at the school-wide level, and they tell a reasonably encouraging story for a school of this size and setting. Proficiency in both English language arts and mathematics sits above the midway point, meaning more than half of tested students scored at or above grade level on California's Smarter Balanced assessments. That is a meaningful data point, though parents should know the grade-level breakdowns were suppressed across every grade and subject, almost certainly because the groups tested at each grade are too small for California to report without risking the identification of individual students. This is a common and expected condition for very small schools, not a red flag. Only a single year of school-wide data is available, so trend comparisons are not possible. The comparison positioning relative to districts in Kern County cannot be stated from the data provided, as the proficiency index metric was not applicable due to the suppression of grade-level results.
Program offerings were not available in the data we reviewed, and the district brief found no lasting curriculum or pedagogy changes, bond measures, or major policy shifts within the last several years worth flagging. The district describes itself publicly as a small single-school district in a rural community on the west end of Kern County, which is exactly what the data reflects.
Fellows itself is a genuinely remote, quiet place. The community developed as an oil boomtown and has contracted significantly over the decades, reaching a very small resident count at the last census. Oil and gas extraction remains the dominant economic activity in the surrounding area, with a thin local workforce and no large private employer based within the community itself. There are no major housing developments underway, and the community shows no signs of growth pressure. Car ownership is high and commutes are long, which is consistent with a place where most services and jobs are elsewhere, in Taft or further toward Bakersfield.
The housing market reflects the community's scale and economic character. Property values and rents at this end of Kern County are low relative to California broadly, and homeownership rates are relatively high. For a family already working in the oil and gas sector or willing to commute, the cost of entry is accessible in a way that is unusual for California.
A parent considering this school is essentially evaluating a very small, self-contained TK-8 experience in a tight-knit rural community with no local commercial infrastructure to speak of. The academic results available suggest the school is performing at a functional level, but the thin data makes it hard to draw firm conclusions. A parent would do well to contact the school directly about specific program offerings, staffing stability, and how the district supports students who may need additional academic help or enrichment, since those details did not surface in what we reviewed.
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