The top reported proficiency rate is 31% in Science. The lowest is 24% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Highland Jr.-sr. High
Highland Jr.-Sr. High serves grades seven through twelve as the sole secondary school for the Lewis County C-1 district, located in the very small, rural Missouri town of Lewistown. The school was not designated a charter school, and information about its magnet status and Title I participation was not available. The town itself sits at the junction of two state routes within the Quincy, Illinois-Missouri micropolitan area, suggesting some economic ties to the larger community across the Mississippi River. The school district did not appear to have any recent, publicly reported changes that would be immediately relevant to families, according to the information available.
The student body is predominantly white, with small shares of students who are Black or of two or more races. Over two-fifths of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a metric that signals a substantial share of families with lower household incomes. The school’s enrollment fits the scale of a small rural high school, serving a few hundred students. Data on the share of students with disabilities and those classified as English learners was not available in the record.
Academically, the state testing results from the Missouri Assessment Program place the school in a challenging position. Proficiency rates in both math and English language arts were reported only for seventh grade; the eighth-grade ELA figure was suppressed. In seventh-grade math and ELA, roughly one-fifth to just over one-quarter of students scored at a proficient or advanced level. Eighth-grade science results were slightly higher, with about three in ten students reaching that benchmark. When this school’s overall performance across tested subjects and grades is compared to those of other districts within Lewis County, it falls in the bottom quartile. A four-year graduation rate was not available in the data, so a key measure of high school completion cannot be evaluated from this source; a parent may want to look into this further with the school.
The school’s setting is a small, rural Missouri town that has experienced a sustained population decline over the past two decades. No major new housing developments, commercial projects, or growth initiatives were documented in the search results. No walkability scores or descriptions of street life were found for Lewistown. It covers a small geographic area of land and lacks any public transit system referenced in available sources. The historic Quincy, Missouri, and Pacific Railroad Station in town, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, hints at a traditional small-town center, but no information was found on how school buildings relate to that civic core. Major employers in the area were not identified in the search results; residents may commute to nearby communities, though no source confirmed this.
The school does not appear to offer a wide array of specialized program offerings that appeared in the data. No record of Advanced Placement, dual-credit, career and technical education pathways, or other academic tracks was available, which may simply reflect data not reported rather than an absence of such opportunities. Given that the school covers both junior high and high school grades, it is the only secondary option in the district, meaning students in Lewistown and the surrounding rural area attend this single school for their entire secondary career.
For families considering this school, the academic profile, as measured by state assessments, shows that a majority of students are not reaching proficiency in core subjects, a pattern that places the school below the midpoint among the county’s other districts in the comparison set available. The school serves a community that is contracting in population, with a notable share of students from lower-income households. The school’s essential character is that of a familiar, small-town setting where the student body is largely homogeneous and the path through seventh through twelfth grade takes place under one roof, but where academic performance relative to state benchmarks is a concern that a parent would want to explore directly with the school.
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