The top reported proficiency rate is 0% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Daly School
Daly School serves kindergarten through fourth grade in Hamilton, Montana, as part of the Hamilton K-12 Schools district. The school sits on Daly Avenue in the heart of town, a setting that places it within a small community that also serves as the Ravalli County seat. Hamilton has a population that grew noticeably in recent years, part of what is publicly described as one of western Montana’s faster-growing areas, with a climate locals call the Banana Belt drawing new residents. The town’s economy mixes retail, construction, and professional services with a distinctive biomedical research presence that includes both a federal Rocky Mountain Laboratories and a GSK biologics campus. Residential streets, a traditional downtown grid with a Carnegie library and county museum, and nearby trails in River Park and Skalkaho Bend shape the everyday environment.
The school itself enrolls a solid number of students for an early-elementary building, with roughly balanced classes across kindergarten through fourth grade. The student body is overwhelmingly white, with a modest share of Hispanic students and small representations of other racial groups. More than half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a proportion that places the school in a context where economic support for families is plainly a factor in daily operations. The district did not report data on students with Individualized Education Programs or English learner status, so those dimensions of the student population are not available from the records examined.
Because Daly School serves only grades kindergarten through four, the state testing results that Montana publishes for grades three through eight do apply to a portion of its students, but the data on the record shows zero proficiency rates for those tested grades. The proficiency index, which averages reported rates across tested subjects and grades, places the school in the bottom quartile relative to other districts in Ravalli County. This is a soft spot that a parent would want to look into further with the school. The reported rates of zero may reflect a data reporting issue or an extremely small number of tested students in those grades rather than actual student performance, but the record as it stands carries no explanation. A parent should ask the school directly for its state assessment results and for any local or district-level assessments used to track early literacy and math progress before fourth grade.
No information is available on the school’s staffing ratios, teacher qualifications, class sizes, or chronic absenteeism. Discipline data is also absent from these records. The school does not operate as a charter or magnet school, and its Title I status is not listed.
For a family considering Daly School, the key takeaway is that this is a standard early-elementary public school in a growing small town with a notable biomedical industry base. The student body is economically diverse relative to the community, and the school’s academic performance data for the few grades that are tested is not useful on its face and requires clarification from the school. The district’s overall programming, any pre-kindergarten offerings, and how Daly feeds into the district’s upper elementary and middle schools are not covered in the available records and would be natural questions for a school visit. The housing market in Hamilton has seen appreciation, with home values near the middle of the range for Ravalli County, which itself sits above the national typical price level. Families moving into the area on the strength of the employment base should expect a school that serves a broad cross-section of the community, where the local economy provides stability but the academic data for the youngest grades is incomplete in the public record.
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