Original Research by School Decision on North Daviess Elem.
North Daviess Elementary sits in the village of Jameson, a rural community in Daviess County that has seen a long, steady decline in population. The village itself is tiny, with a footprint of just a few square miles and a Main Street anchored by the Lions Hall, the firehouse, and the post office. There is no commercial strip or private employer of note; the school district, along with the fire protection district and village government, serves as the primary civic institution. The surrounding area is agricultural farmland, and the built environment consists of a small grid of single-family homes. Families considering this school should understand that they are looking at a very small, place-based school in a community that is not growing.
North Daviess Elementary serves prekindergarten through sixth grade. Its enrollment is very small, and the student body is made up entirely of white students. Every student who attends qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, which indicates a high level of economic need across the school community. The school is a regular public school and is not a charter or magnet.
State testing data is not available in a usable form for this school. The Missouri Assessment Program results for math, English language arts, and science were all suppressed, which happens when the number of students tested in a grade is too small to report publicly in order to protect student privacy. For example, the third-grade group that took the math and ELA tests had only a handful of students. The same was true for the fifth-grade science test from a prior year. Because of this suppression, a parent cannot compare this school’s proficiency rates to other schools on the state report card. If you are considering this school, you would need to ask school staff directly about how students are performing academically, as the public data does not answer that question.
Since the school serves only early and middle grades, there is no graduation rate to report, and there is no data on chronic absenteeism. Information about special education and English learner populations was also missing from the data. The school’s size means that many standard metrics are simply not available, not because the school is underperforming but because the counts are too small for public reporting.
The school is part of the North Daviess R-III school district, which is headquartered in Jameson. A search for recent district changes found little of lasting impact for this very small rural district. The district’s operations appear stable and low-profile.
Housing in the area is modestly valued relative to national benchmarks, though prices have risen in recent years. The median home value in the zip code is well above the state median, but that figure reflects the broader area, not necessarily the village itself, where the housing stock is older and limited. The national unemployment rate is moderate, and median household income nationally is around the national figure. Given the village’s population decline, the local housing market is likely thin, with few transactions.
In short, North Daviess Elementary is a very small, rural school that functions as a central part of a shrinking community. Its strength is its intimate scale and its role as a local anchor. The trade-off is that public academic data is largely unavailable, and families will have to rely on direct conversations with the school to gauge student learning. The school is best suited for families who value a close-knit, small-town setting and are comfortable making enrollment decisions without the typical state test comparisons.
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