The top reported proficiency rate is 46% in Science. The lowest is 28% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Sanders Elementary School
Sanders Elementarysits on West Washington Street in Hollandale, a small Mississippi Delta town in Washington County. The school serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grade as part of the Hollandale School District, a rural, remote district by federal classification. It is a traditional public school, not a charter.
The student body is small for its grade band. Nearly every child is Black, and every student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. The school does not report its English-learner or special-education counts, so a parent looking for that information would need to ask the school directly. The district's own brief turned up no recently reported changes in curriculum, facilities, or governance that would shift a family's decision.
On the most recent Mississippi Academic Assessment Program results, proficiency varies widely from grade to grade. In English language arts, fourth grade stands out as a relative bright spot, with a clear majority of tested students reaching proficiency. Third and fifth grade ELA results land more modestly. Math follows a different pattern: fourth grade again is the strongest, third grade sits below that, and fifth grade math is the weakest result in the building, with only a small fraction of tested students clearing the proficiency bar. Fifth grade science falls in the middle, with close to half of tested students proficient. Because the tested group in each grade is small, a few children moving in or out can shift a rate substantially. A parent may want to ask the school about how instruction is sequenced across grades, particularly what happens between fourth and fifth grade in math.
No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say from the provided information whether these results are improving, declining, or holding steady. Participation rates were also missing from the state data.
Hollandale itself is a town shaped by agriculture and decline. Cotton farming has been the economic anchor for generations, and publicly reported sources describe a community that has been mired in poverty for decades. The population has been falling since the town's peak, and the city's budget remains constrained, with a millage rate that the state auditor has described as stretched indefinitely. Some grant-funded infrastructure work is underway for drainage, water meters, and street and sewer repairs, but no major new housing development has been reported. The town sits along Deer Creek, with Leroy Percy State Park, the oldest in Mississippi, just to the west. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker honoring Sam Chatmon and a Country Music Trail marker for Ben Peters are local cultural touchstones.
For a family thinking about housing, the local market is among the most affordable in the state. Home values in the school's zip code sit far below both the Mississippi and national benchmarks, and the year-over-year trend shows a sharp decline. The price-to-income ratio is well below the national figure, meaning that for a household with steady income, ownership is financially within reach in a way it is not in most of the country. No rental data was available for the immediate area.
What this adds up to is a small, closely knit elementary school in a town working against long economic headwinds. The academic picture is uneven, with real strength in the middle elementary grades and a clear soft spot in fifth grade math that a parent would want to understand before enrolling. The peer environment is homogeneous, and the entire student body lives in or near poverty, which shapes the resources and attention the school must direct toward nonacademic needs. No data on staffing ratios, discipline, course access, or attendance was provided, so those pieces of the picture are absent here. A family considering Sanders would be choosing a school embedded in a community with deep roots and real challenges, where the affordability of housing is set against the reality of decades of economic contraction.
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