The reported proficiency rate for English language arts is 16%.
Original Research by School Decision on Young Elementary
YoungElementary is a regular public school in the Jefferson County Public Schools system, serving kindergarten through fifth grade in the West End of Louisville. Its location on West Muhammad Ali Boulevard places it in a historically significant corridor of the city, an area that reflects a mix of older residential neighborhoods and commercial frontage along a major thoroughfare.
The school enrolls a modest number of students for an elementary school, drawing from a community where the large majority of families qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is predominantly Black, with a smaller but notable share of Hispanic students and very small numbers of white students, students of two or more races, and American Indian or Alaska Native students. Asian and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students are not represented in the enrollment. The school does not report data on students with disabilities or English learners, so those figures are not available for a fuller picture of the student support needs.
Academically, the picture is limited because Kentucky suppresses proficiency results for most grade-level and subject combinations when the group is small. The only reported result is for third-grade reading, where a small share of tested students met the state proficiency standard. All other tested subjects and grades math, fourth- and fifth-grade reading, fourth-grade science, and fifth-grade social studies have their proficiency results suppressed. When we look at the proficiency index across all available data, which here is essentially that single third-grade reading result, Young Elementary falls in the bottom quartile compared to other elementary schools in Jefferson County. That is a starting point for a parent to investigate, but the suppression makes it hard to gauge how the school performs across grade levels and subjects; the school may have too few students in each tested group to report publicly, and that itself can affect how families assess academic trends from year to year.
The school operates within the Louisville consolidated city-county government, an area that is low-density by national standards and largely car-dependent beyond the immediate downtown. Housing in the Young Elementary attendance zone is notably more affordable than the state median, with home values and rents falling well below what is typical for Kentucky. That lower cost of housing is a factor for families considering the area, though it also reflects the economic conditions of the neighborhood.
No program offerings are listed in the available data, and the district brief turned up no recent parent-relevant changes to report. Because Young Elementary is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade building, there is no graduation rate and no high school course access to evaluate. A parent interested in the school would want to ask the school directly about its approach to reading and math instruction in the early grades, given the one reported proficiency number, and about how it supports students given the high proportion of families facing economic disadvantage. The school's small enrollment and suppression of most test data mean that beyond the broad comparison showing it at the low end of the county, the academic record is thin enough that a visit and conversation with staff would be especially important.
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