Original Research by School Decision on Cambridge Elementary School
Cambridge Elementary School sits at the heart of a small farming, ranching, and logging community in Washington County, Idaho. The town occupies a sheltered valley northwest of Boise along U.S. Highway 95, with a compact downtown centered on Superior Street and a history tied to the Pacific and Idaho Northern Railway. Fires destroyed most of the original timber-frame commercial buildings, leaving the Jewell Building, now home to the Cambridge Idaho Museum, as a rare survivor on the National Historic Register. Publicly reported sources describe the community as very small in both population and geographic footprint, with growth that has been slow and modest over many decades. No major housing developments or development projects surfaced in the available search results. Recreation anchors include proximity to Hells Canyon and Idaho Power hydroelectric dams on the Snake River to the west. No public library or local transit system was identified in the available sources.
The school serves prekindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school within Cambridge Joint District. Enrollment is small, which is characteristic of a rural agricultural town of this size. The student body is predominantly white, with very few students from other racial or ethnic backgrounds. A moderate share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Information on students with individualized education programs and English learners was not available in the data provided.
Academic assessment results from the state are largely suppressed or missing across mathematics, English language arts, and science for the most recent school year. This pattern often reflects the small size of tested groups at a school like this, where privacy protections kick in. The state did report that a small group of third graders sat for the math assessment, but proficiency results for that grade and all other tested grades were either missing or suppressed. Some aggregate English language arts data appears in the multi-year trend records, showing a wide range across grade levels, but with such small tested groups and suppressed grade-level detail, this does not provide a reliable picture of academic outcomes. A parent looking for a clear read on how students perform on state assessments would need to contact the school directly, as the publicly available data does not yield a dependable proficiency signal at this scale.
The district brief for Cambridge Joint District did not surface any parent-relevant changes such as property tax shifts, referenda, curriculum changes, or facility updates from the recent past. The available record is quiet on shifts that might affect a family's decision.
Several categories of information that would help round out a picture of the school were not provided. There is no graduation rate, which is expected because the school serves only elementary grades and does not graduate high school students. Title I status was not reported. Data on staffing, attendance, discipline, and course access was absent. Civil rights data was not included. No comparison set positioning the school against its neighbors was available. Program offerings were not listed. Locale classification from the federal system was also not provided.
What a family can gather from the available record is that Cambridge Elementary is a very small rural school embedded in a tight-knit agricultural community with slow growth and limited commercial activity. The town's identity is rooted in farming, ranching, and logging, with civic life anchored along Superior Street and connections to outdoor recreation to the west. For a family considering this school, the small size means close-knit classrooms and individual attention are likely. It also means publicly reported academic data is too thin to evaluate from a distance. Reaching out to the school directly for current classroom-level information, staffing details, and program offerings would be the practical next step for any parent weighing this option.
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