The reported proficiency rate for Math is 0%.
Original Research by School Decision on Lc Hatcher Elementary School
LC Hatcher Elementary School sits on Church Street in Lucedale, the county seat of George County, Mississippi. It is part of the George County School District and serves children from prekindergarten through second grade. The enrollment is small, as one would expect for a school covering only the earliest grades, with a prekindergarten class, kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, plus a group of ungraded students. Every child at the school qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, which places it firmly among schools serving a high-poverty community. The student body is predominantly white, with a substantial Black minority and a small number of children identifying as Hispanic, Asian, or two or more races.
Because the school stops at second grade, Mississippi's state assessments, which begin in third grade, do not normally apply to the children enrolled here. The data set does contain some grade 3 and grade 4 assessment results tied to this school's identifier, but nearly all of those results are suppressed, likely for small-group privacy reasons. One grade 4 math result was reported rather than suppressed, and it shows no students scoring proficient or above. With the tested count itself suppressed, it is hard to know how many children that figure represents, and a parent may want to ask the school or district directly what that result reflects and whether it stems from a prior grade configuration or from ungraded students tested at those levels. For the school as it operates today, serving prekindergarten through second grade, state testing results are not a meaningful measure of its work, and that gap should not be read as a weakness.
The broader context of Lucedale matters for any family considering this school. Lucedale is a small city positioned roughly forty miles northwest of Mobile, sixty miles southeast of Hattiesburg, and thirty-five miles north of Pascagoula. A state highway runs through town as Main Street, forming the primary commercial and civic spine. City Hall and the George County Courthouse both sit along this corridor, giving the downtown a traditional small-town Southern layout. The Lucedale Depot Greenway offers walking trails, an accessible boardwalk, and small fishing ponds near the center of town, and Lucedale City Park has a playground, walking track, splash pad, and baseball facilities. The Lucedale-George County Public Library, part of the Jackson-George Regional Library System, hosts community programming including a periodic Mississippi Shakespeare event. No fixed-route public transit serves the area, so daily life runs on driving.
George Regional Hospital, a community-owned nonprofit serving several counties, is a major employer, and county government offices provide additional jobs. No comprehensive employer list was available in the publicly reported sources we reviewed. The city has been growing modestly since the 2020 census, and its website points to housing opportunities while describing the community as retaining small-town character. Specific new residential or commercial developments were not identified.
Housing in the school's zip code sits above the state benchmark for typical home values and well below the national one, which places it in an affordable range relative to much of the country. The price-to-income ratio is moderate, meaning a family earning a typical income is not stretched as far as in many markets, though current mortgage rates add pressure to monthly costs.
We looked for recent parent-relevant changes in the George County School District, such as program launches, facility decisions, or policy shifts with lasting impact, and found little meeting that threshold in publicly available sources, so we left that section out rather than guess. Information on staffing ratios, discipline, attendance, course access, and special-population services for this school specifically was not available in the data provided. A family weighing LC Hatcher would benefit from asking the district directly about class sizes, available pre-K programming details, support services, and how children transition from second grade into the upper elementary grades within the district.
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