The top reported proficiency rate is 53% in English language arts. The lowest is 12% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Billings Elem.
Billings Elementary is the only public elementary school in the Billings R-IV district, serving students from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. The school sits in the small town of Billings, Missouri, a community of a few hundred residents in Christian County that is part of the broader Springfield metropolitan area. The town has a volunteer fire department, its own police force, and a FEMA storm shelter located next to the high school, but the available sources mention no public library or parks. The population has been relatively flat to slightly declining in recent years, and no major new housing developments or commercial growth were identified in the area. For a family considering this school, it means a setting where the school and town are tightly woven together, and where growth pressures are minimal.
The student body is overwhelmingly white, with small numbers of Black, Hispanic, and Asian students. Just under half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which is a meaningful marker of the economic context that families bring with them to school each day. The school draws from a single small town, so the peer group is largely the children of the town itself, with the mix of backgrounds that entails.
On the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), the school’s results show a pattern that is typical for a small school where year-to-year variation in a single grade can be large. In third-grade math, roughly one in three students scored proficient or above. In fourth-grade math, the share was similar. Sixth-grade math came in at a similar level. Fifth-grade math, however, was a very weak result, with a small single-digit share of students reaching proficiency. The science results for fifth grade were also low, with a small share of students meeting the bar. English language arts results were mixed: third-grade ELA was a relative bright spot, where about half of students were proficient, while the results for fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were suppressed in the available data, so a clear picture for those grades is not available. Compared to other districts in Christian County, Billings Elementary’s overall proficiency index placed it in the bottom quartile among the county’s seven districts. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, particularly to understand the support structures in place for math and science instruction across grades, and to ask what is being done to address the very low fifth-grade numbers.
The school does not serve high school grades, so there is no graduation rate to report. No information on chronic absenteeism or discipline was available. The district brief turned up no recent parent-relevant changes, meaning there were no major boundary shifts, new facilities, or program overhauls that would alter the day-to-day experience. What a family gets here is a straightforward, small-town elementary school where the academic numbers are uneven and generally below the county midpoint, but where the setting offers the familiarity and close community that many parents seek in a small district. For a family that values that kind of environment, the conversation should focus on how the school is working to strengthen its core instruction, particularly in math and science, and whether the available academic supports match their child’s needs.
See more original research from School Decision →