The reported proficiency rate for Math is 67%.
Original Research by School Decision on Bakersfield Elem.
Bakersfield Elementary serves the village of Bakersfield, a very small, rural community in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, and the surrounding agricultural area. The school covers pre-kindergarten through fifth grade and is part of the Bakersfield R-IV district, which houses all grades on a single K-12 campus near the village’s main crossroads. The village itself, with a declining population, has no major industries; its economy centers on farming, logging, and milling. The school functions as one of the primary civic anchors alongside a post office, a health clinic, and three churches. Daily life is car-dependent, and there is no public transportation. Housing values in the area are modest relative to national benchmarks, and the community has seen slow population decline in recent decades.
The student body at Bakersfield Elementary is very homogeneous. The enrollment is relatively small for a PK-5 school. Nearly all students are white, and a substantial share qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, indicating that many families face economic challenges. Data on the share of students receiving special education services or who are English learners was not available. The school is a regular public school and not a charter or magnet. It was not clear from the available data whether Bakersfield Elementary receives Title I funding, which is a common federal support for schools with high poverty rates.
State assessment results give a limited picture of academic performance because many grade-level results are suppressed, which can happen when testing groups are too small to report publicly. This is a common situation in a school of this size. For the grades where data is available, the picture is mixed and points toward a school where some students are performing well. In fourth-grade math, slightly over half of students scored at the proficient or advanced level. Fifth-grade math was notably stronger, with a large majority of students reaching that benchmark. No English language arts or science results were reported for any grade; all were suppressed. A proficiency index that averages performance across all tested subjects and grades places the school in the top quartile relative to the handful of districts in Ozark County, though the comparison is based on a very small group of schools. The available math results are encouraging, but the suppression of ELA and science data means a parent cannot get a full picture of how students are doing in those core subjects from this test cycle alone. A family may want to ask the school directly about its reading and science performance.
Because the school serves only grades PK through 5, there is no graduation rate, and measures like chronic absenteeism were not available in the data. The district brief identified no recent changes to district operations or programming. There is no information about what programs or special offerings the school provides, such as art, music, or enrichment activities. A parent would want to visit or contact the school to learn about what is available outside the core academic subjects.
The weakness of the test data is the central limitation here. The school’s math results in the grades that could be reported are solid, and the index comparison suggests the school holds its own among a small set of rural Ozark County peers. But the large number of suppressed scores in reading and science means a family cannot fully evaluate academic outcomes from public data alone. Given the small size and rural setting, this is not unusual, but it does mean that conversations with the school and a visit are the most reliable way to understand the academic experience. For a family considering this school, the primary draw would likely be the setting: a tiny, tight-knit rural community where the school is a central institution, and where class sizes are inherently small. The academic data offers a partial signal, not a complete one.
See more original research from School Decision →