The top reported proficiency rate is 56% in English language arts. The lowest is 49% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Cash Valley Elementary
Cash Valley Elementary serves prekindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school in the Allegany County Public Schools district. It is located in LaVale, a car-oriented census-designated place that functions as the primary retail hub for the Cumberland metropolitan area. LaVale has no incorporated municipal government, no traditional downtown, and its commercial and civic life is organized along the National Road corridor. The community sits in the shadow of Haystack Mountain and has seen a slow population decline in recent years, though it retains the region’s largest concentration of commercial land. The most notable recent civic investment was a major renovation and expansion of the LaVale Public Library that completed in 2022.
The school draws from the immediate LaVale area. Middle and high school students in LaVale are zoned to Braddock Middle School and Allegany High School, both located in nearby Cumberland. For families considering the district as a whole, Allegany County Public Schools offers a Chinese Partial Immersion Program (CHIP) at the elementary level and has a proposal to extend it to high school, which could matter for families seeking a language immersion pathway. The district has also initiated an Elementary Schools Facility Utilization Study, which typically precedes decisions about school closures, consolidations, or attendance boundary changes; a parent looking at the area may want to track where that process leads.
Cash Valley’s enrollment is split across grades PK through five in roughly even sections. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The student body is predominantly white, with small shares of Black or multiracial students and very small shares of Asian, Hispanic, or other groups. Data on the proportion of students receiving special education services or English-learner support was not reported.
State testing results are available for math, English language arts, and science, all from the 2024-25 school year. Performance varies noticeably by grade. In third grade, about half of students scored proficient or above in math and about half in ELA. In fourth grade, about a third of students scored proficient in math and about half in ELA. Fifth grade results are markedly stronger: more than seven in ten students scored proficient in both math and ELA, and about half scored proficient in science. This pattern of stronger fifth-grade results could reflect a number of factors including cohort differences or instructional emphasis, and a parent may want to ask the school about how achievement trends look across successive years for the same group of students. Multi-year trend data was not available, so this single-year snapshot is the only picture.
No comparison to other schools in Allegany County was possible, because the comparison set contained only one district-level entity. This school’s proficiency results therefore cannot be positioned relative to other elementary schools in the area through the data provided.
A parent considering Cash Valley Elementary should note that the school’s academic profile is mixed, with a clear uptick at fifth grade but softer numbers in third and fourth grade math especially. The absence of special education and English-learner counts means that a family whose child may need those services would want to confirm availability directly with the school. The district-level facility study underway also makes this a time when school attendance boundaries or future building use could shift, which is worth watching if you are making a housing decision tied to this attendance zone. The community itself offers suburban highway-oriented convenience, a strong public library anchor, and the retail amenities of Country Club Mall, but little in the way of walkable street life or a traditional town center. For a family looking for a small elementary school in a retail-focused exurban setting within commuting distance of Cumberland, Cash Valley fits that description, with the caveat that the academic picture varies by grade and year.
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