The reported proficiency rate for Science is 0%.
Original Research by School Decision on Hawks Home School
Hawks Home School serves the early and middle grades, from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, in the unincorporated community of Hammond, Montana. The school is part of the Hawks Home Elementary district, and the immediate context is important for understanding what this place is and is not. Hammond itself is not a town in any conventional sense. Publicly reported descriptions note that it is a small cluster of buildings along a U.S. highway, consisting of an active post office, a rancher’s home, and several abandoned structures. There is no downtown, no pedestrian infrastructure, and no signs of new development. The area around it is mostly ranchland. This is a remote, rural setting where the school is the central institution for a very small population.
The enrollment is tiny. The student body is all white, and the grade-by-grade counts show a handful of children spread across pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade. There are no students enrolled in most grade levels. The data on economic disadvantage, special education, and English learner status is not reported, so it is not possible to describe the share of students in those categories. The school’s Title I status is also not listed.
State testing results are largely suppressed because the number of students tested is so small. For math and English language arts in grades three through eight, the proficiency rate was suppressed by the state, and only one student was tested in each subject. The science assessment for the same grade band reported that zero students scored proficient or above, with zero students tested. These results should be read with extreme caution. The testing counts are so low that the numbers carry very little statistical meaning. A parent considering this school would want to discuss how the school tracks academic progress for such a small group of students, and what the instructional approach looks like across the combined-grade classroom.
The district, Hawks Home Elem, received a state-level public recognition. According to a local news report, the district was named one of Montana’s most successful schools by the state’s Decennial Study Commission, a designation based on long-term high performance across its two rural schools. This is a meaningful signal from the state that the district has a track record of strong educational outcomes, even if the individual school’s test data cannot be interpreted in a conventional way.
Because the school only goes through eighth grade, there is no graduation rate to report. There are no data on chronic absenteeism, discipline, staffing ratios, or course access. No information on programs such as advanced coursework, arts, or career and technical education is available. The school is not a charter or magnet school.
This is a school for a very specific family profile. It serves a deeply rural, ranching community where the school is essentially the classroom for the handful of children in the area. The state recognition for the district suggests that the small-school environment is working well for its families, but the available evidence is thin. A parent would be choosing this school for its setting and its community fit rather than for a broad array of programs or for test-score comparisons that cannot be made. Anyone outside this immediate area would need to consider the logistics of getting to a school that sits along a highway in an unincorporated place with no commercial services.
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