Original Research by School Decision on Loring Colony School
Loring Colony School in rural Phillips County serves an exceptionally small student body, from preschool through eighth grade. The public school is part of the Malta K-12 Schools district and sits in the unincorporated community of Loring, a tiny agricultural outpost near the Canadian border that originated as a stop on the Great Northern Railway. The community today is quiet and dispersed, with no downtown and a local economy driven by farming and ranching. Development has not come to Loring; publicly reported accounts describe it as a once prosperous community that has seen decline after rail service ended, leaving it as a static rural settlement.
The school itself is very small, a characteristic that directly shapes nearly everything about it. State testing data for the most recent year is suppressed, which the state typically does when the number of students tested is very small. Given that the school serves a single-digit enrollment and covers grades from pre-kindergarten through eighth, a parent should understand that this is not a school where one can examine typical academic performance metrics. The school does not serve high school grades, so there is no graduation rate, and no data on chronic absenteeism or discipline were available.
A parent considering Loring Colony School should expect an environment defined by its scale. The student body is entirely White. The school is not a charter and has no magnet designation. Information on the share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, special education services, and English learner status is missing from the available data. No program offerings or course access data were reported.
What the data makes clear: this is not a school a family chooses for breadth of programming, test-score comparison, or peer diversity. It is a school that exists to serve the children of a very small, isolated agricultural community. The closest sizeable town is Malta, roughly a long drive south, and it is likely that students are bussed there for secondary schooling. The district, Malta K-12 Schools, had no publicly reported recent parent-relevant changes in the available sources.
For the family already living in Loring or the immediate surrounding area, this school represents the local elementary option. For any other family, the path would be to understand that the academic offering is so small that state metrics are suppressed, the sheer size of the student body means every child receives extensive individual attention, and the setting is deeply rural with few of the extracurricular or enrichment opportunities that larger schools provide. A parent interested in this school would need to reach out directly to the district to learn what a typical day looks like, how specialist subjects are handled, and what middle school options exist after eighth grade.
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