The top reported proficiency rate is 0% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Powell County High School
Powell County High School serves grades nine through twelve in Deer Lodge, Montana, the county seat of Powell County. With an enrollment that is small for a high school and a student body that is overwhelmingly white, this is the sole high school in the Powell County High School district. The town itself has been in a long-term population decline since its mid-20th-century peak; the local economy now rests on corrections, healthcare, and heritage tourism. The Montana State Prison remains a major employer, and the Deer Lodge Medical Center and the Old Prison Museum complex add to the civic and institutional base. The school sits within a compact, traditional Main Street town that has a designated historic district and serves as a gateway to the Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site. The interstate highway provides regional access.
State testing results for the high school level were not available in the data provided. The assessment data that was reported covers only grades three through eight, meaning the typical measures of math, English language arts, and science proficiency that apply to high school students—often a separate assessment like the ACT in Montana—are not present here. A parent looking at test performance will need to seek that information directly from the school or district. The graduation rate, a standard indicator for a four-year high school, was also missing from the available records. Without that figure, it is not possible to characterize how many students complete a diploma on time. Civil rights data on discipline, staffing ratios, attendance, and special population counts (students with disabilities, English learners) were absent as well. A reader should be aware that several common data points for a high school are simply not accounted for in this snapshot.
The comparison positioning that is provided is too thin to be useful. The cohort of districts in Powell County is very small, and the metrics that normally allow a parent to place this school against its neighbors—proficiency rates, graduation rates, chronic absenteeism—were either not applicable because the school's own values were missing or because the group was too small to compute. So there is no reliable county-level benchmark available from this source.
What is clear is the school's size and composition. Enrollment skews toward the middle grades of high school, with the largest reported number of students in eleventh grade. The racial and ethnic makeup is almost entirely white, with very small numbers of Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial students. The data did not include counts for students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, a common proxy for economic disadvantage, so the socioeconomic profile of the student body is not known from this material.
The district brief turned up no recent, lasting changes that would affect a parent's or resident's experience—no boundary shifts, program consolidations, or leadership transitions were found in the search. The school's offerings—whether it provides Advanced Placement courses, dual enrollment, career and technical education, or extracurricular pathways—were not listed in the data. Without that information, the academic program beyond the core curriculum cannot be described.
This is a small high school in a small, shrinking town where the institutional anchors are the prison, the hospital, and the historic museum campus. The data gaps are substantial. A family considering this school would want to ask directly about academic outcomes, postsecondary preparation, and program options, because the public record provided here does not cover them.
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