Original Research by School Decision on Pritchett Elementary School
Pritchett Elementary School serves students from preschool through fifth grade in the town of Pritchett, a very small rural community in southeastern Colorado. The school is part of the Pritchett School District No. Re-3, a tiny district that serves roughly fifty students across all grades. The elementary school itself enrolls about forty children, with the largest group in preschool and smaller numbers in each successive grade, a pattern that reflects the town’s long-term population decline.
The student body is almost entirely white, with a very small Hispanic enrollment. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet, and it serves only early grades, from preschool through fifth grade. Because the school does not serve tested grades in sufficient numbers for the state to report results, state assessment data for math, English language arts, and science was suppressed. The participation rate was low enough that the state did not release proficiency figures. This is not unusual for a school this small, but it means there is no public state testing record to evaluate academic performance. A parent looking for a clear academic benchmark will not find one in the state data.
The school is part of the Pritchett School District No. Re-3, which serves the entire town and the surrounding rural area. The district recently added both an elementary and a high school Response to Intervention teacher, a move that signals a focus on individualized academic support. For a district with very small class sizes, this kind of targeted help can be meaningful, but the elementary school itself does not serve high school grades, so the high school RTI position applies to the district's older students, not to this building.
Pritchett is a town in long-term population decline, with a shrinking number of school-age children. The town has no grocery store, gas station, or restaurant; the nearest services are a drive east to Springfield, the county seat. There is no public transportation, no public library, and no stoplight in the entire county. Employment is limited to the school district, town government, and a handful of small businesses. The school is the largest employer in town. For families considering this school, the context is a very small, isolated rural community where the school is the central institution and the nearest amenities are a substantial drive away. The district's recent addition of RTI teachers suggests an effort to provide individualized academic support in a setting where class sizes are already very small. Because state testing data was suppressed due to low participation, there is no public record of how students perform on Colorado's standardized assessments. A parent would want to discuss academic progress directly with the school.
See more original research from School Decision →