The top reported proficiency rate is 0% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Troy High School
Troy High School serves ninth through twelfth grade in the small town of Troy, Montana, a community of a few hundred residents tucked into the Kootenai River gorge between two mountain ranges. The school is the secondary campus of the Troy H S district, and its roughly 140 students share the building with seventh and eighth graders in a combined junior-senior high setup.
The student body is predominantly white, with a very small number of Hispanic, Asian, and two-or-more-race students, and a single American Indian student. Every enrolled student qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, a level of economic need that is total and rare. The district and town have faced long-running economic pressures: the Troy Mine closed a few years ago, and the area continues to recover from a major EPA Superfund asbestos cleanup that concluded within the last decade. No major new housing or population growth is evident. The community is compact and walkable in its core, with outdoor recreation as a central draw, but the economic base is constrained.
State testing results for the 2023-24 school year show a proficiency rate of zero percent in math, English language arts, and science. The number is striking. However, the state assessment used in Montana is the Smarter Balanced Assessment for math and ELA and the Montana Science Assessment for science, and these tests are administered in grades three through eight. Troy High School serves only grades nine through twelve. It is very likely that no students in the tested grade band attend this school, which would explain the reported zero. The data does not clarify this directly, but a parent should verify with the school or district whether high school students take a different assessment in later grades, and what those results show. Without that information, there is no usable measure of academic performance from state tests for this school.
The comparison set, which places Troy High School among other districts in Lincoln County, reports an overall proficiency index that lands in the bottom quartile. But again, the index is built from the same grades three through eight data, so it does not reflect the performance of Troy's high school students.
Enrollment is small and declines sharply from tenth grade to twelfth. The ninth and tenth grade classes are roughly the same size, but the junior and senior classes are each about half that size. There are no data on special education or English learner populations, and no graduation rate is reported. The neighborhood comparison also notes that both a four-year graduation rate and chronic absenteeism rate are missing from the available data.
The school's parent district, Troy H S, shows no recent major changes or initiatives in the publicly available record. The town's civic life centers on a handful of parks, trails, a disc golf course, and seasonal events like a farmers market and a July 4th celebration. Housing values in the area are somewhat below the state median, and the local economy relies on mining, education, retail, and tourism.
For a family considering this school, the central fact is the absence of both state test results and a graduation rate, leaving a significant gap in what can be known about academic outcomes. The student population is small, rural, and uniformly low-income. The school building is within walking distance of the town center, and the community is tight-knit. A parent would need to talk directly with the school to understand how students perform on the assessments that matter for college and work readiness, and to learn what programs and pathways are actually available in a building with very few students in the upper grades.
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