The top reported proficiency rate is 0% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Bainville High School
Bainville High School is a very small public high school serving grades nine through twelve in the far northeastern corner of Montana. It is part of the Bainville K-12 Schools district, which operates as a single building for all grades in the town. The high school itself enrolls about a few dozen students, spread across the four grade levels, with a senior class comparable in size to the freshman class. The student body is overwhelmingly white, with a small Hispanic population and a handful of multiracial students. Roughly a quarter of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a rate that reflects the working-class character of the community.
The school sits in Bainville, a prairie town that was transformed by the Bakken oil boom about a decade ago and has since settled into a post-boom contraction. The town remains a working community defined by agriculture, rail-served grain elevators, and a frac sand facility that supports oil drilling across the border in North Dakota. Housing is limited within town, and residents often travel to nearby Culbertson, Sidney, or Williston for broader services. The population has been declining in recent years, and no major new housing developments were identified in available sources. For a family considering this school, the practical context is a rural, vehicle-dependent setting with a modest housing market shaped by the boom-and-cycle of the energy industry.
When it comes to academic performance, the available data is thin and requires careful interpretation. The state assessment results reported in this dataset are for grades three through eight, not for high school grades. Bainville High School does not serve those tested grades, so the reported proficiency rates of zero percent in math, English language arts, and science simply do not apply to this school. A parent looking for high school test results—such as end-of-course exams or the ACT—will not find them in this profile. The same gap applies to the comparison that places this school in the bottom quartile among districts in Roosevelt County: that comparison is based on the same grades three through eight data and therefore does not speak to the high school's academic performance. The four-year graduation rate was also not available in the data, so there is no direct measure of how many students complete high school here. These are significant information gaps, and any family evaluating this school would want to ask the district directly about its high school achievement, graduation rates, and postsecondary readiness.
The school offers no publicly reported program offerings in this data, so it is unclear whether students have access to Advanced Placement, dual enrollment, career and technical education, or other specialized pathways. Given the small size of the school, course options are likely limited relative to larger high schools, but the trade-off is a close-knit environment where teachers and students know each other well. The school is the sole secondary option in the district; there is no charter or magnet alternative in Bainville itself.
Student support data such as special education identification rates, English learner counts, and chronic absenteeism were also absent from this profile. The town's economy, while rooted in agriculture and energy, does not produce a large number of high-income households, and the median household income reflects the influence of Bakken-era wages that have since moderated. For a family that values a small, rural high school with a tight community and is comfortable with limited data on academic outcomes, Bainville High School may fit. For anyone seeking detailed performance metrics or a wide array of course offerings, the missing information would be a clear prompt to investigate further directly with the school.
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