Original Research by School Decision on Cambridge Middle/high School
Cambridge Middle/High School is a combined secondary school serving grades six through twelve in the small rural community of Cambridge, Idaho. It operates as a regular public school within Cambridge Joint District. The town sits in a sheltered valley in Washington County, northwest of Boise along U.S. Highway 95, and publicly describes itself as a farming, ranching, and logging community. The school serves a very small student body, with roughly equal class sizes across each grade from sixth through twelfth. The enrollment is small enough that each grade level represents a single cohort of a dozen or fewer students.
The student population is predominantly white, with a small Hispanic presence and a single student identified as two or more races. About a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Data on individualized education programs and English learner status was not reported, so those figures are not available here.
State assessment results for the most recent school year were suppressed across all tested subjects and grade levels. The school's ISAT proficiency rates in math, English language arts, and science for grades six through eight all carry a suppressed status. This commonly reflects very small testing cohorts in rural schools, where publishing results could identify individual students. A parent looking for current proficiency data would need to contact the school or district directly, as the publicly reported figures do not provide a usable picture of academic performance at this time.
The available multi-year trend data for ELA proficiency shows wide variation across data points, but the change calculation was not completed, and with suppressed current-year results, drawing conclusions about trends would be speculative. We note this gap rather than attempt an interpretation the data does not support. No graduation rate data was provided for this school, and no nationally standardized academic context was available.
Cambridge itself is a compact town covering a small geographic footprint. The commercial district centers on Superior Street, anchored by the Cambridge Idaho Museum in the historic Jewell Building, the town's only remaining timber-frame commercial structure after fires destroyed earlier buildings. The town has experienced very slow growth over decades, with population fluctuating within a narrow range and modest increases projected. No major housing developments or commercial expansion projects surfaced in publicly available sources. The local economy remains rooted in agriculture and natural resource industries, with the school district and city government among the primary local employers alongside farming and ranching operations. No housing value or rental data was available for this community.
Recreation in the area centers on proximity to Hells Canyon, which lies west of town along State Highway 71, and Idaho Power hydroelectric dams on the Snake River. U.S. Highway 95 connects Cambridge to Weiser and Payette to the south and Council and New Meadows to the north. No public library or transit system was identified in the available sources, with the nearest library likely in Weiser, the county seat. The school's physical relationship to downtown is not detailed in available sources, but given the town's compact size, the campus sits within or immediately adjacent to the downtown footprint.
Information on course offerings, dual-credit pathways, career and technical education programs, extracurricular activities, staffing levels, discipline data, and attendance rates was not available in the data provided. Title I status was also not reported. A parent evaluating this school for college preparation or specialized programs would want to ask the district directly about what academic pathways are available to students in the upper grades, particularly given the combined middle and high school setting and the small cohort sizes that shape what courses can feasibly be offered. The district brief did not surface any parent-relevant changes such as property tax shifts, referenda, curriculum updates, or facility projects, and no comparison data positioning Cambridge against neighboring districts was available.
For a family considering this school, the defining characteristics are its size and setting. A combined secondary school in a small agricultural town offers a close-knit environment where students are known individually, but the trade-off is a narrower range of course offerings and activities than larger schools can sustain. The suppressed assessment data means the academic picture must be gathered through direct conversation with the school rather than from publicly reported metrics.
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