The top reported proficiency rate is 59% in English language arts. The lowest is 27% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Cornell Elem School
Cornell Elementary School serves kindergarten through eighth grade in a small, declining agricultural village in Livingston County. The school sits on a residential-edge campus away from the village center, serving a nearly all-white enrollment of around a hundred students with very modest demographic diversity. The school is part of Cornell Community Consolidated School District 426, a single-school district that recently passed a property-tax-backed debt service extension in April 2025 to fund ongoing facility repairs and improvements without needing new referendums for individual projects.
The most striking feature of Cornell Elementary's recent performance is the sharp gap between its stronger English-language arts results and its weaker mathematics and science outcomes. In English language arts, proficiency rates across tested grades range from just over half of fourth graders meeting the standard to nearly all of sixth graders doing so, with seventh graders also showing solid performance. Third grade performs above that, with two-thirds of students proficient. Eighth grade shows a dip, but overall the ELA picture is solid.
Mathematics tells a different story. Third grade is particularly weak, with fewer than one in five students proficient. Fourth grade sits at the midpoint. From sixth through eighth grade, proficiency ranges from just under half in sixth grade down to none in eighth grade. This eighth-grade collapse in math is the school's most acute challenge; the data shows not a single student met the state standard in 2025. Science results are sparse because the state tests only select grades, but eighth-grade science proficiency is also very low, with roughly a quarter of students proficient.
State testing data was not available for fifth grade, so the school's full K-8 picture has gaps. When Cornell Elementary's overall proficiency is indexed across the grades and subjects tested, the school sits in the top quartile of districts in Livingston County, meaning it outperforms most of its county peers on this aggregate measure. That position reflects the strength of ELA results pulling the overall picture up and masking the severity of the eighth-grade mathematics and science weakness.
The school's enrollment is small and stable, with roughly a hundred students across ten grade levels. The student body is overwhelmingly white, with very few students of color and no reported enrollments for English learners or students receiving special education services; these populations may be unreported rather than absent. Free-or-reduced-price-lunch data was not published, so economic context for the school is unknown. School discipline data, attendance, staffing, and course-access information were not available.
Cornell sits in a village that has been on a slow but steady population decline for decades, with modest-priced housing (median home values well below state and national benchmarks) and thin commercial life. The nearest amenities beyond the village are towns more than a dozen miles away. Flanagan-Cornell High School, which serves this area's high school students, is located in Flanagan, another small town in the county, roughly a dozen miles away. For families considering this school, the trade-off is small class sizes and a quiet rural setting against limited academic momentum in upper grades and the reality that the community is shrinking rather than growing.
A parent may want to look into what the school is doing to address the eighth-grade performance collapse and whether tutoring or intervention resources are available in mathematics and science, particularly as students approach the transition to high school.
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