The reported proficiency rate for English language arts is 58%.
Original Research by School Decision on Kershaw Intermediate School
Kershaw Intermediate School sits in Sugar City, a small bedroom community just north of Rexburg in Madison County, Idaho. The school serves third through fifth graders in the Sugar-Salem Joint District, which draws students from a wide rural area spanning Plano on the west to Newdale on the east. Sugar City itself is quiet and auto-oriented, with agricultural land surrounding a compact town center where city hall and a veterans park sit along Center Street. The town's history runs through a sugar beet factory that anchored the local economy for decades before closing, and agriculture remains a driving factor today. Nearby Rexburg, a short drive southwest, hosts Brigham Young University-Idaho, a regional economic engine that continues to bring new residents to the broader area. Growth in Sugar City has been steady, driven partly by spillover from Rexburg, and the community rebuilt substantially after the Teton Dam flood.
The school's enrollment is modest for its grade band, with students distributed across the three grades fairly evenly. The student body is predominantly white, with a small Hispanic presence and very few students in other racial or ethnic categories. A moderate share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The school's Title I status was not reported, and information on English learner and special education populations was not available.
On state assessments, Kershaw's results present a mixed picture, and much of the data was reported as ranges rather than precise figures, which limits what can be said with confidence. In English language arts, the one grade level with a fully reported proficiency rate showed a majority of tested students reaching proficiency. Other ELA grade levels were reported as ranges by the state, as were all math grade levels. The math ranges suggest potential strength in the lower grades and a softer showing by fifth grade, though the range reporting makes precise comparison difficult. Science was tested only in fifth grade and also reported as a range. Average scale scores were not available for any grade or subject. A parent may want to look into the science and fifth-grade math results further with the school, since those areas showed the widest reported ranges.
The multi-year trend data for ELA across all grades was difficult to interpret. The series appeared to contain points from the same school year, and no clean change was computed. Without comparable prior-year data, year-over-year direction cannot be assessed from what was provided.
Housing in the Sugar City zip code sits below the state benchmark for typical home values but above the national one, with values having risen at a moderate pace recently. Estimated monthly mortgage costs are substantial given current interest rates, and rent data was not available for this location. The price-to-income ratio suggests that buying a home here is somewhat more attainable than in higher-cost parts of Idaho. For families considering a move, Sugar City offers small-town quiet with proximity to Rexburg's amenities and the university there, but limited civic infrastructure of its own. No public library or transit system was identified in available sources, meaning residents likely depend on Rexburg for those services.
The district brief for Sugar-Salem Joint District did not surface any parent-relevant changes of lasting impact in recent reporting. No program offerings data was available for the school, and information on staffing, course access, attendance, and discipline was not reported. Civil rights data was also absent. Parents weighing Kershaw will find a small intermediate school in a close-knit, family-oriented rural community, with some academic results that look solid where they are fully reported and others that remain opaque because of how the state released the data. The gaps in available information largely reflect what was and was not reported for a school of this size and grade range, so a reader should not read a missing result as a weak one.
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