The top reported proficiency rate is 49% in Math. The lowest is 44% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Maxine Johnson Elementary
Maxine Johnson Elementary sits in Parma, a small agricultural town in the rural western stretch of Canyon County. The town's identity runs through farming. Onion storage facilities, agriculture equipment production, and a University of Idaho research and extension center anchor the local economy. Civic life clusters along a compact downtown corridor on 3rd Street, where City Hall and the public library sit, while schools occupy separate campuses set back from that core. The city sits at the junction of two rivers, a Union Pacific rail line, and US Highway 95, with Interstate 84 a short distance away. Publicly reported growth has been modest but steady, with new pharmacy and dental offices joining the commercial mix and acreage lots available for residential development. No public transit serves the town.
The school itself is a regular public school serving pre-kindergarten through fourth grade, part of Parma District. Its enrollment is moderate for an elementary in this region. About half of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. The racial and ethnic composition is majority white with a substantial Hispanic presence, and small numbers of students from other backgrounds round out the population. Data on English learners and students with individualized education programs was not available in the provided records, so those profiles remain unnamed here.
Academic results come from Idaho's ISAT, tested in third and fourth grade. Third grade is the stronger showing. In both math and English language arts, the majority of third graders reached proficiency. Fourth grade tells a different story. Math proficiency drops to a level where fewer than half of tested students cleared the bar, and English language arts falls further still, with under a third of fourth graders reaching proficiency. The gap between third and fourth grade is wide in both subjects but especially pronounced in reading and writing. A parent weighing this school may want to look into how the fourth-grade cohort is supported, particularly in literacy, and whether the school has identified this pattern and responded. No trend data across multiple years was available in a form that allows clean year-over-year comparison, so it is hard to say whether this is a one-year dip or a persistent pattern.
Because Maxine Johnson serves only early elementary grades, it has no graduation rate, no advanced coursework, and no career or dual-credit pathways to speak of. Those pieces belong to the upper grades within Parma District. The school's Title I status was not reported in the available data. Information on discipline, staffing ratios, attendance, and course access was also absent from the records reviewed, so those dimensions of school life cannot be characterized here. We looked for district-level strategic priorities, bond or levy history, and recent programmatic changes, but the district brief returned little beyond a search query, so rather than guess, we left that section out.
Housing in Parma's zip code sits above both the Idaho state benchmark and the national benchmark for typical home values, reflecting the broader pattern of Canyon County real estate. Estimated monthly mortgage costs run higher than rent by a meaningful margin, which may shape decisions for families weighing buying versus renting in the area. Median household income at the national level has been rising modestly over several years, and unemployment has held in a low and stable range. These macroeconomic conditions frame the community context but do not by themselves describe what a child's day at Maxine Johnson looks like.
What the data does describe is an early-elementary school in a tight-knit agricultural community where third-grade proficiency is solid and fourth-grade results, particularly in literacy, are a clear area of concern. The town is growing slowly, with new services arriving and housing values climbing above state norms. For a family rooted in or drawn to rural Canyon County life, the school is a local institution whose academic picture is mixed and whose fourth-grade outcomes warrant a direct conversation with school leadership before enrolling.
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