The top reported proficiency rate is 36% in Science. The lowest is 20% in Social studies.
Original Research by School Decision on Beaverton Elementary School
Beaverton Elementary School sits in the heart of a small Gladwin County community that built its identity around plastics and thermoforming manufacturing. The city of Beaverton publicly brands itself as the "Plastic Thermoforming Capital of the World," a label tied to industry roots stretching back to the mid-twentieth century. Brown Machine, a long-standing thermoforming equipment manufacturer near the M-18 corridor, anchors that industrial identity. The downtown core runs along Brown Street, with residential streets radiating outward and a dam on the Tobacco and Cedar rivers creating a scenic pond that defines the local landscape. Ross Lake Park, just across the bridge from downtown, serves as the primary civic gathering space, hosting a weekly farmers market and a World War I memorial monument. The city publicly describes itself as walkable and tight-knit, and its website features a section titled "School District Above the Rest," suggesting the schools are a point of local pride. The housing market here is modest by state and national standards, with home values well below the Michigan benchmark, though recent appreciation has been strong. A family buying into the area would find affordable housing relative to much of the state, with a price-to-income ratio that sits comfortably below what many larger markets demand.
The school serves pre-kindergarten through sixth grade, with an enrollment that is mid-sized for a rural elementary setting. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the modest-income character of the surrounding community. The student body is predominantly white, with small numbers of Hispanic students and students of two or more races. Data on special education enrollment and English learners was not available in the provided records, so those figures are left out here rather than guessed. The school operates as a regular public school within Beaverton Schools, the local district.
On state assessments, the most recent results show a mixed and generally modest picture. In mathematics, proficiency rises from third grade through fourth before dropping off in fifth. Third-grade math sits below the midpoint of what one might hope to see, fourth-grade math improves somewhat, and fifth-grade math falls to the lowest level among the tested grades. English language arts follows a different pattern, starting low in third grade, improving in fourth, and reaching its highest point in fifth. Science proficiency in fifth grade lands in a middling range, while social studies proficiency in fifth grade is the weakest result across all tested subjects and grades. Taken together, the school's overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades places it in the bottom quartile relative to districts in Gladwin County, a comparison set that includes only two districts. That positioning is worth a parent's attention. The school is not where it would want to be academically, and a parent may want to look into how the building is responding to these results, particularly in fifth-grade math and across the board in social studies.
The comparison set itself is small. With only two districts in Gladwin County, the county-level positioning should be read as a narrow snapshot rather than a broad regional judgment. Graduation rate and chronic absenteeism data were not available for this school, which is expected given that it does not serve high school grades and those metrics do not apply to this grade band.
Program offerings were not provided in the available data, so questions about extracurriculars, intervention supports, or specialized instruction cannot be answered from what is here. Civil-rights data, discipline information, course access, and staffing details were also absent. We searched for recent district-level changes such as referendums, curriculum overhauls, or property-tax shifts and found little of lasting impact, so that ground is left uncovered rather than filled with speculation.
What a parent can take from this is a school in a proud, compact, industrially rooted small town where housing is affordable and the community leans into its identity. Academically, the current proficiency numbers are soft, and the school sits at the lower end of its county comparison set. A family considering Beaverton Elementary would want to ask the building directly about its improvement plans, what supports exist for students below proficiency, and how the upper elementary grades are structured to address the dip in fifth-grade math.
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