The top reported proficiency rate is 46% in Science. The lowest is 23% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Buder Elem.
Buder Elementary serves students from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade in the city of St. Louis. It operates as a regular public school within the St. Louis City school district, one of many neighborhood elementary schools spread across the city.
The student body is diverse. White students make up the largest share, followed by a substantial number of Black students and a meaningful presence of Hispanic students. There are also smaller groups of Asian students and students who identify with two or more races. Every enrolled student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, which puts the school in a category where the entire population participates in this federal program.
Academic performance on the Missouri Assessment Program shows a pattern that parents will want to consider carefully. In the most recent testing year, the rates of students scoring proficient or above varied by grade and subject. In third-grade math, roughly one in every seven or eight students met that bar. Fourth-grade math was similar. Fifth-grade math was higher, with well over a third of students reaching proficiency. In English language arts, the results followed a similar grade-level arc: roughly a quarter of third graders were proficient, fourth grade dipped, and fifth grade rose to about two in every five students scoring at that level. Fifth-grade science showed roughly a similar proportion as the fifth-grade English result.
When you compare Buder’s combined proficiency across tested subjects and grades to other elementary schools within the St. Louis City district, the school sits above the midpoint among those that reported results. That is a relative measure within a wide field. It places Buder in the middle-to-upper part of the city’s public elementary landscape for achievement, though the absolute proficiency rates are well below what many families would consider a strong academic floor. A parent choosing this school will want to understand how the school supports students who are not yet meeting state benchmarks and what trajectory the school is on.
The school is structured around its neighborhood, not a magnet theme or a charter status. It does not appear to have a specialized program focus. There is no information in the data about discipline rates, chronic absenteeism, or staffing levels, so those dimensions of school climate are not available for review.
St. Louis as a city provides the broader context. It is an independent city with a mixed economy that includes manufacturing, trade, transportation, and aviation, along with major hospitals and research universities. The city’s cultural institutions are well known: Forest Park, the Saint Louis Zoo, the Science Center, the Art Museum, and the Missouri Botanical Garden, among others. The school’s location on Lansdowne Avenue places it in a residential section of the city. The housing market in the zip code shows home values and rents that are moderately above the national price-to-income benchmark. The area offers a mix of older housing stock and neighborhood retail.
No recent parent-relevant changes were identified for the St. Louis City district in the data provided. That means the district brief turned up no major shifts in boundaries, programming, or leadership that would be publicly reported as a lasting change for families.
Buder Elementary fits a family looking for a neighborhood school in a diverse urban setting, where the student body is entirely drawn from families eligible for meal assistance. The academic picture is mixed, with proficiency rates that climb in the upper elementary grades but remain low in absolute terms, and the school’s position relative to other city schools is above the midpoint. It is not a magnet school or a school with a specialized academic focus. A parent considering the school should ask about academic interventions and enrichment, given the proficiency gaps, and should look for recent information on attendance and school climate, since those fields were not available in this data.
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