The top reported proficiency rate is 25% in Science. The lowest is 15% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on West Tallahatchie High School
West Tallahatchie High School sits along U.S. Highway 49 East in the tiny Delta town of Webb, Mississippi, serving grades seven through twelve as part of the West Tallahatchie School District. The school is the secondary anchor for a community that has seen decades of population decline, and its enrollment is small for a combined middle-high school spanning six grade levels.
The student body is almost entirely African American, and every student qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. The school does not report figures for special education or English learner populations, so families seeking detail on those services would need to ask the school directly. With such a small enrollment, class sizes are likely intimate, and students across the seventh-through-twelfth grade band share a single campus. The school is not a charter or magnet; it operates as a traditional public school within its district.
On Mississippi's MAAP assessments, the most recent results show proficiency levels that are low in both math and English language arts. In seventh-grade math, roughly a quarter of tested students reached proficiency. Eighth-grade math was lower, with fewer than one in five meeting the proficiency bar. English language arts followed a similar pattern: about a fifth of seventh graders were proficient, and the eighth-grade rate dropped further. Science, tested only in eighth grade, landed near the same level as seventh-grade math. Average scale scores are reported but, without statewide context embedded in this dataset, a parent would want to compare those against state benchmarks directly. No multi-year trend data was available, so it is unclear whether these results represent a stable pattern or a recent shift. Participation rates were also missing from the data.
The school serves high school grades, and graduation rate information was not included in the available data. This is a gap a parent should ask about, since graduation and post-graduation outcomes matter as much as test scores for families considering a secondary school. No data on advanced course offerings, career pathways, dual-credit programs, or extracurriculars was provided, so the academic pathway beyond core instruction is unknown from this source.
Webb itself is an extremely small, predominantly residential town in the flat Mississippi Delta, organized around a modest grid with town hall on South Laura Street as its primary civic anchor. Publicly reported sources describe a community with minimal commercial activity, no identified major employers, and no documented parks, libraries, or transit services within the town itself. The population has been declining for decades, and no new housing developments or growth initiatives surfaced in the available research. Cassidy Bayou runs near the town, providing a natural feature, but formal recreational infrastructure was not documented. The broader economic context is one of contraction and limited local opportunity, conditions shared by many small Delta communities.
The West Tallahatchie School District operates two schools: R.H. Bearden Elementary and West Tallahatchie High School. The district brief search turned up no reports of recent parent-relevant changes, strategic initiatives, or program launches, so there is little to report on the district's current direction from the available data.
What the data paints is a small, community-rooted school in a town facing serious demographic and economic headwinds. Academic results as measured by state tests are weak across tested subjects and grades, and the absence of graduation data, course-access information, and program detail leaves real gaps in the picture. For a family considering this school, the most productive next step would be to contact the administration directly, ask about graduation rates, what happens to graduates after they leave, what support structures exist for students performing below grade level, and whether any career or college-readiness programs are available that the data does not capture.
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