The top reported proficiency rate is 0% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Rapelje High School
Rapelje High School serves grades nine through twelve in the unincorporated farming community of Rapelje, Montana. The high school is part of a single K-12 district that functions as the central civic and social anchor of a town with fewer than one hundred residents. This is a very small school. Its total high school enrollment is modest, with small counts in each grade. The student body is predominantly white, with a small share of students identifying as two or more races and a very small share identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native. About one in five students qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. Data on students with disabilities and English learners were not available for this report.
The school sits in a community that was laid out as a railroad town more than a century ago and has seen a long, steady cycle of population decline since the railroad was removed. The remaining built environment is sparse: grain elevators, a cafe, a church, and the school clustered along the highway. The surrounding economy is agricultural, centered on grain shipping and ranching. There are no major employers in the conventional sense, and no recent housing development or growth projects were identified in available sources. For context on where this school stands academically among its peers, the most relevant comparison available is relative to districts in Stillwater County.
State testing data for Rapelje High School shows a proficiency rate of zero percent in math, English language arts, and science. No students were reported as scoring at the proficient or above level on the Smarter Balanced Assessment or the Montana Science Assessment. However, the number of students tested was also zero. This is an important detail. A parent should look into this further with the school to understand whether state assessments were administered at all for this grade band this year. In very small rural high schools, state testing data can sometimes be suppressed or simply not collected when enrollment numbers are extremely low. The available record does not provide a tested population, so it is not possible to draw a meaningful conclusion about academic performance from these results. The school’s overall proficiency index, which averages performance across tested subjects, also falls in the bottom quartile among the county’s districts, but again that calculation is based on a proficiency rate of zero tied to a tested count of zero. A family would want to ask the school directly about how students are assessed and what their typical academic outcomes look like.
A four-year graduation rate was not available. This is another metric that may simply not apply or be reported for a school with such a small senior class. No data on chronic absenteeism was reported either. The school’s programs were not listed in the available data, so there is no information on whether it offers career and technical education courses, dual credit through a local college, or advanced coursework such as Advanced Placement. For a school of this size in a rural setting, it is common for such offerings to be limited or provided through cooperative arrangements with neighboring districts. A parent would want to confirm directly what pathways are available.
What the available data makes clear is that Rapelje High School is a place defined by its setting. The entire district educates students from kindergarten through twelfth grade in one building. The high school enrollment is very small, which can mean more individualized attention from teachers, a tighter-knit peer group, and a school day where students are known personally by every adult in the building. It also means fewer course options, limited extracurricular breadth, and a student experience that is inherently shaped by the remote, agricultural character of Rapelje itself. The community’s population has been declining for decades, and the school district is one of the few remaining institutional presences. For a family looking for a traditional rural high school experience where the school is at the center of community life and class sizes are very small, this environment could be a fit. For a family expecting robust test performance data, a track record of high graduation rates, or a wide menu of academic programs, the available information does not support those expectations and the school would need to explain what it offers directly.
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