The top reported proficiency rate is 63% in Math. The lowest is 48% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Durant Road Elementary
Durant Road Elementary is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school in suburban Raleigh. The school sits in a neighborhood on the northeast side of the city, where housing values are in the upper-middle range for the region and the market is active. The school has an enrollment that spans all early grades, with near-even distribution across them.
The student body reflects Raleigh's diversity. Roughly half the students are white, with substantial shares of Black and Hispanic students nearly equal to one another. A majority of the school qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, indicating that most families are below or near the federal income threshold. The school draws from a working- and middle-class community rather than an affluent enclave, and families span a range of economic circumstances.
Academic performance on state testing shows mixed results. In math, about three in five students in grades three through five scored at proficient or above. In English language arts, fewer than half of those grades met proficiency. Science testing, administered to a smaller subset of students in the tested grades, saw roughly half at proficiency or above, though the state changed both the test name and its scoring standard that year, which limits comparability to prior years if any data exists. Reading appears to be a softer area relative to math. Neither trend data nor participation rates were available, so the picture is a single-year snapshot rather than a trajectory.
The district has undergone large curriculum reforms in early literacy. Wake County Schools has adopted the Science of Reading approach district-wide and required all prekindergarten through fifth-grade teachers to complete the state-mandated LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) training. That work finished its core cohort cycle in spring 2024. The district now purchases and evaluates curriculum through that science-of-reading lens. This is a significant pedagogical shift; families familiar with phonics-based, decodable-text instruction will recognize what is happening in early grades across the district, and those newer to it may want to understand the approach.
Raleigh itself is in active growth. Downtown is dense and walkable with civic anchors including the State Capitol and NC Museum of Natural Sciences. Farther out, the city is car-dependent, with walkable historic neighborhoods like Five Points and Oakwood interspersed among more suburban stretches. Tech, healthcare, and professional services dominate the local economy, anchored by WakeMed Health & Hospitals, NC State University, IBM, Red Hat, and investments in the nearby Research Triangle Park. Apartment rents and home values are both rising. The city is adding major mixed-use districts and renovating legacy buildings, reshaping its footprint in real time.
Wake County Schools itself is managing rapid growth through both new construction and reassignments. The district opened four new schools in 2025-26 and will open at least one more in 2026-27. A school bond approved by voters in 2022 is funding five new schools and renovations at seven existing ones, paid for through a property-tax increase. Reassignments to balance enrollment happen every year or two and can move families to different schools or even different school calendars. This is a normal part of life in fast-growing Wake County and something families should track through the district's website as their child approaches each grade transition.
No data was available on special education or English learner populations at this school, nor on chronic absenteeism or staffing. The school's immediate academic context cannot be positioned against other Wake schools in this brief because state testing results are reported only by subject and grade band, not with enough granularity to compute a meaningful school-by-school standing within the district. What is clear is that math proficiency is higher than reading proficiency, and a parent interested in language support or acceleration may want to ask the school directly about reading interventions, guided reading groupings, or how the Science of Reading framework is being put into practice in the classroom.
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