Original Research by School Decision on Princess Anne Elementary School
Princess Anne Elementary School serves prekindergarten through first grade, making it a child’s first formal school experience in the Somerset County Public Schools district. Because the school only covers the earliest grades, there are no state assessment results or graduation rate to report. That is not a mark against the school; state testing does not begin until third grade, so this is simply a feature of the grade band.
The enrollment is modest for the grade span, with more than a hundred students in prekindergarten, about a hundred in kindergarten, and somewhat more than that in first grade. Demographically, the student body is majority Black, with smaller White, two-or-more-races, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian or Alaska Native populations. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, reflecting the economic context of the community. Information about the share of students with disabilities or English learners was not available in the data.
Princess Anne is a small historic town that serves as the county seat. It is a compact place, roughly square miles in area, and its character blends civic and government functions with the presence of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, an HBCU that is the most prominent employer and cultural anchor. The historic downtown has preserved Federal and Victorian architecture, and the town describes itself as actively collaborating with businesses to create jobs. The population has grown modestly in recent years, and the housing market in the ZIP code is a good deal more affordable than the state as a whole, which is a consideration for families looking to buy.
The school itself sits within the town’s residential fabric, not on a separated campus. It is part of a small district that has been under state corrective action for low performance. That is a structural backdrop parents should be aware of. The district’s improvement framework shapes curriculum, staffing, and resources across all schools, and this has been publicly reported as an ongoing factor. For a parent of a very young child, the immediate question may be less about test scores and more about how the early learning environment and elementary experience set the stage for the years ahead. The district’s wider challenges may matter more when considering the full K-12 trajectory.
Because the data on this school is limited to enrollment, demographics, and community context, there is not much to say about academics, program offerings, discipline, or staffing—those fields were absent from the data. A parent might reasonably want to ask the school directly about teacher retention, class size, early literacy instruction, and what kind of prekindergarten program is offered. The district brief noted that no specific recent referendum, property tax, or curriculum change news was found in available search results, so the ongoing state intervention is the most concrete structural factor on the table.
In short, Princess Anne Elementary is a neighborhood school for the town’s youngest students, set in a quiet, historically rooted town with a university presence and below-state-average housing costs. Its lack of testing data is not a red flag, only a reflection of the grade band. The broader district context of state oversight is the one clear signal for families to weigh.
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