Original Research by School Decision on Centennial Elementary School
Centennial Elementary sits on Fargo's south side, within the Fargo 1 school district, serving kindergarten through fifth grade. It is a regular public school with an enrollment that is sizable for an elementary building, spread fairly evenly across the six grades. The student body is diverse for the region: a white majority, a sizable Black population, and smaller Hispanic, Asian, multiracial, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander groups. About a quarter of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Data on English learners and special education enrollment was not reported, so those populations cannot be characterized here.
The 2024-25 school year brought North Dakota's new A-PLUS assessment, with changed proficiency cut scores. Because the assessment itself and the scoring benchmarks shifted, the state flags this year's results as not safely comparable to prior years. There is only a single year of data under the new system, so no trend is available. What the current results show is a school where proficiency sits on the lower end across subjects, with a pattern worth understanding. In math, third-grade proficiency falls in a moderate range, then drops in fourth grade and drops again in fifth grade. English language arts follows a similar downward arc across the three tested grades, with fifth-grade results the lowest of the three. Science was tested only in fourth grade, landing in a modest range. Participation was high in every tested grade, so low participation does not explain the results.
The declining grade-to-grade pattern is a soft spot a parent may want to look into further with the school. Whether this reflects cohort differences, the transition to a new assessment, or something about instruction in the upper elementary grades is a question the data alone cannot answer.
Fargo itself is a mid-sized regional hub straddling the Red River, drawing people from southeastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota. The economy runs on healthcare, higher education, technology, food processing, and retail. Sanford Health and Microsoft have both built regional campuses in the city center, and North Dakota State University is a major presence, with much of its student population living off-campus in the Roosevelt neighborhood near campus. West Acres Shopping Center, the state's largest mall, anchors retail near the I-29 and I-94 interchange. Outside the downtown core, the city is built around car travel, with postwar growth having pushed development south and west, the direction in which Centennial Elementary sits. The metro area has historically carried one of the lowest unemployment rates among U.S. metro areas, and the city has grown steadily this decade. A major flood diversion project on the Red River is under construction, the kind of infrastructure investment that reshapes long-term development patterns.
Housing in the school's zip code runs above both the state and national benchmarks. Typical home values sit well above the North Dakota statewide figure and modestly above the national one. Rents, by contrast, are affordable relative to local incomes, and monthly mortgage costs are actually higher than typical rents, an unusual dynamic that makes renting relatively attractive for families not yet ready to buy. The price-to-income ratio is moderate by national standards.
The district brief turned up no specific parent-relevant changes, such as referendums, curriculum shifts, or property-tax adjustments, so there is nothing new to flag on that front. Centennial is a school with a diverse peer environment in a growing, economically stable city, and its current assessment results are a mixed-to-low picture under a brand-new testing framework. Families considering the school, especially for the upper elementary years, would do well to ask how staff are responding to the proficiency data and what support structures exist for students as they move from third toward fifth grade.
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