Original Research by School Decision on Kim Elementary School
Kim Elementary School sits at the center of Kim, a statutory town on the southeastern Colorado plains so small that the school, the post office, and a general store make up the civic core. The town has experienced long-term population decline, with a slight uptick in recent estimates, and remains primarily residential and agricultural. There is effectively no commercial strip, no transit, and no public library. For a family looking at this school, the first and most defining fact is its size: Kim Elementary serves grades PK through 5 with an enrollment that makes it one of the smallest public schools in the state. The student body is predominantly white, with a sizable Hispanic minority, and about a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
Because the school is so small, Colorado’s state testing agency suppressed the results for math, English language arts, and science for the most recent year. No proficiency rates, average scale scores, or participation rates were reported. This is not unusual for a school with so few students in tested grades; the state suppresses data when the tested group is tiny, to protect student privacy. A parent considering Kim Elementary cannot look up standardized test scores the way they might for a larger school. They would need to ask the school directly about how its students are progressing against state standards. The school has no high school grades, so there is no graduation rate to report, nor any chronic absenteeism data in the available records.
The academic program is not described in detail in the data we have. We looked for course access, staffing ratios, special education or English learner counts, and program offerings such as gifted services or intervention support, but those fields are absent. The school’s website (kimk12.org) may provide more information. The parent district, Kim Reorganized School District No. 88, has not made any structural changes in recent years that would register as a lasting shift for families; only routine scheduling adjustments were found in a search.
The peer environment is also defined by scale. With just nine students spanning seven grade levels (PK through 5), each grade typically has one or two children. A child here will be in a mixed-age setting for some activities, and the school functions as a single-room-like environment within a building. That kind of setting can offer close relationships with teachers and a strong sense of belonging, but it may also mean fewer opportunities for same-age peer interaction or specialist instruction than a larger school could provide.
For housing, the town has a small number of scattered homes, very low density, and no new development identified in public records. Families who work outside the town face long drives to La Junta or Pueblo. Employment in Kim itself is limited; the school district and ranching anchor the local economy.
Kim Elementary is a choice for a family that wants a micro-school experience in a remote rural setting and is prepared to fill in the gaps that a thin data profile leaves. The absence of public test scores is a practical constraint, not a judgment on quality. A parent who values a close-knit, small-scale elementary school in a quiet agricultural town should look further into how the school measures student progress, what enrichment it offers, and what the district’s long-term enrollment outlook is, since the town’s population base is very small.
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