The reported proficiency rate for Science is 19%.
Original Research by School Decision on Wood Memorial Primary School
Wood Memorial Primary School in Oakland City, Indiana, is the district’s entry-level school within the East Gibson School Corporation, serving prekindergarten through sixth grade as a regular public school. With an enrollment that is relatively small for its grade band, the school draws from a predominantly rural community where the local economy centers on Oakland City University, the school system itself, and nearby healthcare facilities. The housing market in the area is notably more affordable than both the state and national benchmarks, and the community is experiencing a modest population decline, which contributes to a stable, slow-growth context for the school.
The student body is overwhelmingly white, with a very small number of students who are Black, Asian, or of two or more races. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, indicating a significant low-income population. The school does not serve high school grades, so there is no graduation rate to report, and the data does not include counts of students with disabilities or English learners.
State testing results for Wood Memorial Primary School are unusually sparse, and this is largely because the school’s enrollment by grade is heavily skewed toward the early elementary years. The most recent data shows that the school’s tested grades—third through sixth—each contain only a handful of students, and in several cases just one or two. As a result, nearly all proficiency rates for math, English language arts, and social studies were suppressed by the state to protect student privacy. The only reported result was for science from a prior year, when the school was still serving a larger number of upper-grade students under a different building configuration; that figure placed Wood Memorial’s science proficiency in the bottom quartile relative to other districts in Gibson County. Because proficiency data for the core subjects is largely unavailable for the current school year, a parent cannot draw a clear picture of academic performance from the state’s numbers alone and would need to speak directly with the school or district to understand how students are meeting learning benchmarks.
The district has recently undergone significant restructuring, which directly affects families at Wood Memorial. East Gibson School Corporation voted to close Francisco Elementary School, and elementary buildings were reconfigured so that kindergarten through fifth grade are now on different campuses, with sixth grade moving to the middle school. This means that Wood Memorial’s grade configuration may have shifted or is in transition, and families in the Francisco area now have different school assignments and commuting patterns. On the positive side, the district has also partnered with 4T Academy to offer hands-on, industry-specific education at the high school level, which may be relevant for families planning long-term pathways through the district, though it does not directly affect the primary school years.
The school environment is that of a small rural community where the public schools, the public library, and the university are all within the town’s grid, suggesting that daily life is centered on a compact set of institutions. For a family considering Wood Memorial, the key known factors are the small, early-elementary-heavy enrollment, the district’s recent grade reconfiguration, and the fact that state testing results are too sparse to assess academic trends at this school from public data alone. Parents may want to follow up with the school to learn about curriculum, early literacy approaches, and how the building’s very small upper-grade cohorts are handled instructionally.
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