The top reported proficiency rate is 53% in Science. The lowest is 28% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on William Dean Jr. Elementary School
William Dean Jr. Elementary School sits on Rockport Road in Lexington, the county seat of Holmes County, Mississippi. It is part of the Holmes County Consolidated School District and serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. The school is not a charter or magnet school. Its enrollment is moderate for a rural Delta elementary, and the grade distribution runs from pre-k through fifth with most of the tested cohorts concentrated in third grade and above.
The student body is almost entirely Black or African American, with a tiny handful of white and multiracial students. Every student in the building qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. IEP and English-learner counts were not available in the data provided, so those populations cannot be characterized here. A parent whose child receives special-education or language services may want to ask the school directly about what is available.
State assessment results from the most recent school year tell a mixed story. In math, third graders reached proficiency at a solid clip, and fifth graders were close behind. Fourth grade was a clear dip, with only a small fraction of tested students clearing the proficient bar. English language arts results were more uniform across the three tested grades, and they sat below the math marks at every level. Third and fourth graders landed in roughly the same range, with fifth graders only slightly higher. Science, tested only in fifth grade, was the strongest result by a wide margin, with a majority of students reaching proficiency. Participation rates were not reported for any subject or grade, which limits what can be said about how fully these numbers represent the enrolled population.
No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say whether these results reflect improvement, decline, or stability. A parent trying to gauge direction would need to ask the school or district for prior-year comparisons directly.
The housing market around the school is among the most affordable in the state. Home values in the Lexington zip code sit well below the Mississippi benchmark and far below the national figure, and the area has seen a slight year-over-year decline rather than appreciation. Rental data was not available. For a family considering buying, the price-to-income ratio is close to the national norm, meaning local incomes broadly track local home prices even though both are low. This is a market shaped by long-term economic contraction rather than growth.
Lexington itself is a small rural town organized around a courthouse square, with a formal street grid that loosens into terrain-responsive roads within a couple of blocks of the center. The courthouse sits on a high point visible from the major approaches, and the town slopes down toward Moccasin Creek on its eastern edge. Mississippi Highways 12 and 17 cross at Carrollton Street just north of the square, giving the town its road-network identity. The economy has been agricultural for as long as the town has existed, originally built on cotton and now shaped by the mechanization and consolidation of farming that drove decades of population loss. No specific major employers were identified in publicly available sources beyond county government and the school district itself. No new housing developments, commercial projects, or growth initiatives surfaced in the research either.
That decline is the central context a family should understand. The town was founded specifically to serve as the Holmes County seat, and its civic life remains concentrated downtown rather than spread across separated campuses. The population has fallen in every census since its mid-twentieth-century peak, a pattern tied to agricultural mechanization and the out-migration of Black residents during and after the Great Migration. The estimated population as of mid-2025 continued that downward arc.
The district brief turned up no recent parent-relevant changes. The consolidation of Holmes County and Durant districts predates the review window, and no subsequent curriculum overhauls, referendums, or tax shifts were found in available sources. Nothing was available on discipline, course access, staffing, attendance, or school-level programs, so those dimensions cannot be described here.
What the data does support is a picture of a small, predominantly Black, high-poverty elementary school in a shrinking Delta county seat, with uneven but sometimes strong proficiency results, particularly in science and lower-grade math, and a fourth-grade math result that stands out as a soft spot a parent may want to look into further with the school.
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