The top reported proficiency rate is 58% in Social studies. The lowest is 38% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Perry Central Jr-sr High School
Perry Central Jr-Sr High School serves students in seventh through twelfth grade from across Perry County, housed on a consolidated campus outside Leopold, Indiana. The school is the secondary arm of the Perry Central Community School Corporation, a small district that draws families from a wide rural area. Leopold itself is an extremely small unincorporated community with no downtown, minimal commercial life, and a population that has been roughly static for years. The school's presence here is the result of a consolidation that brought together students who historically attended local high schools in smaller towns like Leopold. For a family considering this area, the school is effectively the single public secondary option within a sizable geographic stretch of southern Indiana’s forested hills.
The student body at Perry Central Jr-Sr High School enrolls just over five hundred young people. The overwhelming majority of students are white, with very small numbers of Black, Hispanic, Asian, or multiracial students recorded. More than a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a share that places the school in a moderate range compared with the national picture—not especially high for a rural school, but present enough that the economic profile of the community matters. The school spans the full secondary range, including a small number of ungraded students, and its size is relatively compact for a combined junior-senior high.
On state assessments, the school’s results are mixed. In math, roughly two out of five students scored at the proficient or above level. In English language arts, the figure was about the same. These results place Perry Central Jr-Sr High School above the other schools in its small county cohort on an overall proficiency index—the top quartile among the three districts in Perry County. That is a meaningful comparative strength within this local context, but it still means that a majority of students are not meeting the state’s proficiency benchmarks in core subjects. A small sample of social studies results from several years ago showed a higher rate, but that test has since changed, and recent data for that subject is not available. A parent may want to ask the school directly about how it supports students who are below proficiency and what its academic intervention programs look like.
The school’s graduation rate was not available in the data used here. That is a notable gap; for a school serving twelfth grade, a graduation rate is one of the clearest signals of whether students are finishing. Without it, a family would want to confirm with the district office or the school itself what the four-year completion rate is. Similarly, data on chronic absenteeism, discipline rates, staffing ratios, and special education and English learner counts were not available. Those are all areas where a parent may want to do their own follow-up.
One area that stands out as a practical advantage is the school’s setting. Being the only secondary school in a rural district that consolidated decades ago means that the campus presumably draws from a broad tax base and avoids the resource fragmentation that plagues very small high schools. But it also means long bus rides for many students; Leopold is not a walkable community, and public transit does not serve the area. The housing market in this part of Indiana is notably more affordable than the national median, with home values below the state average. For a family that values a quiet, rural lifestyle and is comfortable with a school where proficiency rates sit around two in five, but which does better than the other local options, Perry Central Jr-Sr High School may be a fit. For a family whose priority is high academic attainment or a wide array of specialized course offerings, the thinness of the available data suggests careful investigation before making a decision.
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