Original Research by School Decision on South Iron Elem.
South Iron Elementary is a regular public school in Annapolis, Missouri, serving students from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. The school is part of the South Iron County R-I district, which also operates a single secondary school for grades seven through twelve. The elementary school shares School Street with the city hall and the high school, a compact arrangement typical of a very small, fully rural town.
Annapolis itself is a small Ozark community with a population that has been declining slowly. The local economy draws on timber and a granite roofing granules plant, and the school district is a local employer. Housing values in the area are modest, and the cost of living is low. A parent moving here would find a sparse small-town setting with recreational access to the Mark Twain National Forest and the Black River, a public library, and an annual town festival called Freedom Fest. The built environment is not walkable in a conventional sense, though distances within town are short.
The school’s enrollment is small, with under 150 students across grades PK through six. The student body is heavily White, with very small numbers of Black, Hispanic, and multiracial students counted. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, placing the school among those serving a high-need population. Data on students with IEPs and English learners was not available in the source records.
State testing data for the 2024-25 school year is suppressed for all subjects and grades at South Iron Elementary. Suppression typically occurs when the tested group is too small to report publicly, and that is the case here: the tested counts for each grade level were small. There is no way to derive a meaningful proficiency rate from the suppressed data, so no read on academic performance from state assessments is possible. A parent seeking a direct picture of student achievement would find the state test results opaque for this reason. The school does not serve high school grades, so no graduation rate applies.
No disciplinary data, course access information, staffing ratios, or attendance rates were available in the data provided. The district brief from web research did not turn up any recent parent-relevant changes such as bond issues, boundary shifts, or program expansions. The brief found nothing to report.
For a family considering South Iron Elementary, the school offers a small, rural setting within a district where the elementary and secondary schools are integrated into the same street in the town center. The student body is small and relatively homogeneous in racial composition, serving a population with elevated economic need. The absence of state test results is a gap that a parent may want to explore directly with the school or district to understand how students are progressing. The local housing market is among the more affordable in the state, and the community is stable but facing population decline rather than growth.
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