The top reported proficiency rate is 40% in English language arts. The lowest is 29% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Steelville Elem.
Steelville Elementary serves a small rural community in the Missouri Ozarks, taking children from prekindergarten through fourth grade. It is a regular public school, part of the Steelville R-III district, and it sits in a town that calls itself the Floating Capital of Missouri for the Meramec, Huzzah, and Courtois rivers that draw thousands of tourists each year. The downtown has been restored to its early 1900s appearance with a compact Main Street of specialty shops, a soda fountain, and an art gallery, and the county courthouse anchors civic life. The surrounding landscape is Ozark foothills, spring-fed creeks, and countryside.
The town itself is small. Its population has been declining slightly in recent years, and median household income is low, with a high poverty rate. No large industrial or corporate employers were identified in publicly available information; the economy depends on tourism and river recreation, county government, and the school district itself. Steelville is entirely rural and has no public transit mentioned in available sources.
The school serves grades PK through 4, so there are no state test results for the youngest grades, and the school does not have a graduation rate—those metrics apply to the high school, not to an elementary building. For the tested grades, results from the Missouri Assessment Program show that in third-grade math and English language arts, and in fourth-grade math, a share of students scored proficient or advanced. Fourth-grade English language arts results were suppressed in the data and not reported. Overall, when combining all tested subjects and grades, the school’s proficiency rate places above the midpoint among the two districts in Crawford County.
Because the school is small and housed in the same district as the middle and high schools, families considering Steelville Elementary are also choosing the broader Steelville R-III district. The district brief found no parent-relevant changes from the last several years that met the bar of a lasting impact, so any recent developments affecting families were not publicly available or did not exist.
The student body is overwhelmingly white, with a very small share of Hispanic and Black students and no Asian or Native American students reported. More than half of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a marker of the community’s economic profile. Information on students with disabilities and English learners was not available in the data provided, so a parent may want to ask the school directly about supports in those areas.
Steelville Elementary does not have specific program offerings listed in the data, and no details on course access, staffing ratios, or attendance rates were available. As an early-grades school serving a rural district, its scale is small enough that most children in the area attend together, and the academic pathway that follows at the middle and high school is the same set of buildings and teachers that serve students from this elementary school onward.
For a family, this is a school in a small, tourism-dependent town with a low cost of living and limited economic growth. The academic results are in the middle range for the county, and the school is the sole elementary option in its district, so the peer environment is the local community. Parents looking for a range of data points beyond what is reported, particularly on special education and program offerings, may need to reach out to the school directly.
See more original research from School Decision →