The top reported proficiency rate is 80% in Math. The lowest is 77% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Oak Park Elementary School
Oak Park Elementary School sits on Government Street in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, serving kindergarten through third grade as part of the Ocean Springs School District. It is a relatively large early-grades campus for the area, with roughly four hundred and eighty students spread across those four grades plus a small ungraded group. The school draws from a community that blends residential life with a strong arts and tourism identity. Ocean Springs sits on the eastern shore of Biloxi Bay, a short distance from Biloxi, and its historic downtown is lined with live oaks, galleries, shops, and restaurants. The city is a designated Mississippi Main Street community, and its annual Peter Anderson Festival draws tens of thousands of visitors. Outside that walkable core, the built environment turns suburban and auto-oriented, typical of Gulf Coast towns.
The student body at Oak Park is predominantly white, with a meaningful share of students identifying as two or more races and smaller Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations. Just under two-fifths of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which is below what many Mississippi elementary schools report and suggests a community that is relatively comfortable economically, though not affluent across the board. Data on students with individualized education programs and English learners was not available, so a parent wanting to understand special education services or language support would need to ask the school directly. The same goes for staffing ratios, attendance patterns, and discipline information, none of which appeared in the available data.
Academically, Oak Park shows strong results on the only state testing grade it serves. Third graders take the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program, and in the most recent reported year, proficiency rates were high in both subjects. In math, roughly four out of five tested third graders scored proficient or above, and in English language arts, about three out of four did. Those are well above typical Mississippi proficiency levels and suggest the school is doing a solid job preparing early-grade students in core literacy and numeracy. Average scale scores were also strong. Because Oak Park serves only the early grades, there is no graduation rate, no ACT or SAT data, and no advanced coursework to report. Those measures simply do not apply to a kindergarten-through-third-grade school. We looked for multi-year trend data to see whether these results were improving or declining over time, but no comparable prior-year figures were available, so we cannot characterize a direction. Program offerings such as gifted services, arts instruction, or intervention programs were not reported in the available data, and we left them out rather than guess.
Housing in the school's zip code sits above the state benchmark but below the national one, with a typical home value in the upper two hundred thousands and rents in the low seventeen hundreds per month. That puts Ocean Springs in a middle tier for the Gulf Coast. The rent-to-income ratio is manageable for most households, though buying requires contending with mortgage rates that have been hovering in the mid-six percent range. The community's economy has been shaped by post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding and steady growth in its arts and tourism sectors. Public reporting describes growing commercial districts and a relatively stable population.
The Ocean Springs School District did not surface any specific parent-relevant changes meeting a lasting-impact bar in available search results, so there is nothing to report on recent shifts in policy, facilities, or leadership.
What Oak Park looks like, from the evidence available, is a well-performing early-grades school in a culturally distinct Gulf Coast town with moderate housing costs and a walkable downtown core a short drive from the campus. The third-grade proficiency results are a genuine strength. The gaps in special population data, staffing, attendance, and program detail mean a family would want to fill those in by contacting the school directly before making decisions.
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