The reported proficiency rate for Math is 71%.
Original Research by School Decision on Nodaway-holt Elem.
Nodaway-Holt Elementary sits in the small agricultural town of Maitland in northwest Missouri's Holt County, serving students from kindergarten through sixth grade. The community around it is a very small rural farming town that has experienced population decline over the decades, a pattern common to many rural areas in the state. Maitland was once known as the "Bluegrass Mecca" with the world's largest bluegrass seed farm, but that industry relocated to the Pacific Northwest in the mid-20th century. Today the town supports roughly twenty active businesses, and the school district itself is one of the local anchors.
The elementary school is the primary school in the district located within Maitland itself; the district's junior-senior high school and headquarters sit across the Nodaway River in the adjacent town of Graham. Students who live in Maitland and surrounding areas attend this elementary school for grades K-6 before moving on to the combined junior-senior high school. The district entered into an athletic cooperative agreement with the neighboring West Nodaway School District in 2020, which changed the interscholastic sports landscape for students who will eventually reach the secondary level.
The student body at Nodaway-Holt Elementary is relatively small. Enrollment is predominantly white, with a very small share of Hispanic students and no other racial or ethnic groups represented in the reported data. More than half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a rate that indicates a substantial share of families have lower household incomes. This is consistent with a community where estimated median household income and home values are modest, and the regional economy has long been tied to agriculture without a large employer base beyond the school district itself.
State testing data from the Missouri Assessment Program is available for the 2024-25 school year, but it is limited because many grade-level results were suppressed, a common practice when the number of students tested is very small and privacy protections apply. Reported results are available only for third grade and sixth grade in mathematics. In both of those grades, proficiency rates show a majority of students scored at the proficient level or above on the state math assessment. This represents a strong performance in math for those tested grade levels, though the suppressed results for other grades mean a parent cannot get a full picture of math performance across the entire elementary span from this data alone.
English language arts and science results were suppressed across all tested grades, so no proficiency information is available in those subjects. A parent interested in how the school performs in reading, writing, or science would need to seek that information directly from the school or district office. The suppression of so many results is not unusual for a school this size, but it does leave gaps in the publicly reported academic profile.
When placed among other school districts in Holt County, the school's overall proficiency across the subjects and grades where data was reported sits above the midpoint of the county's districts. That comparison is based on the small number of districts in the county, so the range is narrow, but within that local context the school's reported performance is on the stronger side.
No information was available on the school's staffing, class sizes, or disciplinary environment. Chronic absenteeism and graduation rate are not applicable here, as the school only serves elementary grades. The school operates as a regular public school and is not a charter or magnet institution. Title I status was not reported in the available data, though the share of students receiving free or reduced-price meals suggests the school would likely qualify for federal Title I supports.
For a family considering this school, the central facts are a very small, rural setting, a predominantly white student body with a moderate-to-high poverty rate, strong math results in the two grades where data was available, and no publicly reported information on reading or science achievement. The community is in long-term population decline, and housing values are low. The school fits a family seeking a small-town elementary where the peer group is almost entirely from the local farming community and where class sizes are necessarily small by virtue of the enrollment numbers. The gaps in the testing profile mean a parent may want to have a direct conversation with the school about how students are performing in reading and science before making a decision.
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