The top reported proficiency rate is 56% in Science. The lowest is 33% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Friars Point Elementary School
Friars Point Elementary School sits in one of the Mississippi Delta's most quietly historic communities. The town was once the largest cotton shipping port south of Memphis, but the county seat moved to Clarksdale long ago, the river channel shifted away, and a major flood led to levee construction that consumed the original Main Street. Today Friars Point is a small, almost entirely residential place with a bank, a post office, a general store, a nightclub, and a museum that opens sporadically. There is no doctor, clinic, pharmacy, restaurant, library, or recreational center. Nearly all services and employment are found in Clarksdale, about a dozen miles south. The town has no library of its own and no public transit. The school itself is one of the few civic institutions left, and for many families it is the center of daily community life.
The school serves kindergarten through sixth grade and is part of the Coahoma County School District. It is a small school, with just a handful of classrooms per grade. Every student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, which reflects the deep economic challenge of the surrounding community. The student body is almost entirely Black or African American, with small Hispanic and white populations. Data on English learners and special education populations was not available, so those figures are absent here rather than indicative of anything. The school is not a charter and has no magnet designation reported. After sixth grade, students travel to Clarksdale for junior and senior high school at Coahoma County Junior-Senior High School, which means the elementary school is the only educational institution physically located in town.
On state assessments, Friars Point Elementary's results are mixed and vary considerably by grade and subject. In mathematics, proficiency ranges from moderate in third and fourth grade to lower in fifth, with sixth grade landing somewhere in between. English language arts results follow a similar pattern, with third and sixth grade relatively stronger and the middle elementary grades weaker. Science proficiency in fifth grade was the brightest spot, with more than half of tested students reaching proficiency. Participation rates for the assessments were not reported. These are small tested groups, so results can swing sharply from year to year, and a parent reading the numbers should keep that volatility in mind. The school's strongest apparent area is fifth-grade science. The weakest is fifth-grade math, where proficiency dropped notably below the other grades. A parent may want to ask the school what supports are in place for fifth-grade math and how the school is addressing the dip.
No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say from the provided information whether performance is improving or declining over time. The comparison fact-set that would position this school among its county peers was not included, so there is no neighbor benchmark to contextualize these results against similar Delta schools.
The school does not serve high school grades, so there is no graduation rate, no AP or dual-credit data, and no career pathway information to report. Program offerings, staffing levels, discipline data, attendance figures, and course access information were all absent from the available data. Housing values and rents for the area were not provided. We looked for parent-relevant changes in the Coahoma County School District, such as curriculum shifts, facility investments, or governance changes, and found little publicly reported, so we left that out rather than guess.
What a parent is left with is a picture of a small, community-anchored elementary school in a town that has seen decades of economic decline. The school appears to be doing respectable work in early-grade math and fifth-grade science, while English language arts and upper-elementary math remain areas where proficiency is lower and a parent would be right to ask questions. The peer environment is intimate, with small class cohorts and a student body that reflects the town's demographic character. The broader context is one of limited local resources outside the school walls, which places added weight on what happens inside them.
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