The top reported proficiency rate is 33% in Math. The lowest is 24% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Laura Speed Elliott Middle
Laura Speed Elliott Middle School serves sixth through eighth grade in Boonville, the county seat of Cooper County, a small city on wooded bluffs above the Missouri River roughly midway between Kansas City and St. Louis. The middle school is one of four schools in the Boonville R-I district and sits in or near the town center, not on a separated campus. Boonville itself is a mix of residential neighborhoods, a historic downtown with cobblestone streets and a large number of National Register properties, and institutional employers that include a state correctional center, the school district, a casino, and Anheuser-Busch's Warm Springs Ranch breeding farm for the Budweiser Clydesdales. The population has been roughly flat to slightly declining in recent years, and while the city describes itself as ripe with opportunity, large-scale new housing construction does not appear to be the dominant pattern; adaptive reuse of historic buildings is more typical. Street life is modest outside of festival periods, though the Katy Trail brings cyclists and hikers through downtown.
The student body at Laura Speed Elliott Middle is composed predominantly of white students, with a notable share of students who identify as two or more races and smaller shares of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian or Alaska Native students. Every student at the school qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. This is a school where economic need is universal, not concentrated in a subgroup. Data on students with disabilities and English learners was not available in the record.
State testing results from the Missouri Assessment Program are the primary academic measure available. Across the three tested grades and three subjects, proficiency rates sit in a range that a parent would want to look into further. In math, the share of students scoring proficient or advanced declines as grade level rises, from a rate that is somewhat above the school's own average in sixth grade to a lower rate in eighth grade. In English language arts, the pattern moves in the opposite direction: the lowest rate appears in sixth grade, with incremental improvement by seventh and eighth grade, though still at a modest level. In eighth-grade science, the proficiency rate is comparable to the middle of the school's own math range. When placed alongside other districts in Cooper County, Laura Speed Elliott Middle's overall proficiency index sits in the top quartile of the set. That comparison universe is small, with only a handful of districts, so being near the top of that group does not necessarily indicate strong absolute performance; it means the school's results are higher than most of the other schools in the county.
Because the school serves only middle grades, there is no graduation rate to report, nor data on chronic absenteeism. No information was available on course access, staffing ratios, or discipline incidents, so those aspects of the school environment cannot be characterized from the record.
The district brief yielded little about recent changes in Boonville R-I. No major bond measures, boundary shifts, or program additions were found in the search, so a reader should not assume anything about momentum or disruption from that silence; it may simply mean no significant change was publicly reported.
For a family considering this school, the essentials are straightforward. This is a small-city middle school where every student qualifies for meal support, where the student body is majority white with meaningful diversity in the share of multiracial and Black students, and where state test results indicate a core academic challenge in both math and reading that a parent would want to explore directly with the school. The school sits in a community that values its historic downtown and trail access, where employment is anchored by a mix of state government, gaming, and agriculture-linked enterprise, and where the housing market is more affordable than the national benchmark. The character of the place is stable and modest in scale, not one of rapid suburban growth.
See more original research from School Decision →