Original Research by School Decision on Little Heart Elementary School
Little Heart Elementary School sits along a county road in Saint Anthony, North Dakota, a tiny unincorporated community in southeastern Morton County. Saint Anthony was founded by German and Hungarian Catholic settlers and retains a restored school building, St. Anthony Catholic Church, and a single restaurant, Rusty's Saloon and Grill. There is no commercial strip, no sidewalks, no public library, and no transit. The nearest civic services and libraries are in Mandan, roughly fifteen to seventeen miles north. The surrounding landscape is open prairie and farmland, with the Heart and Little Heart Rivers and the Morton County State Game Management Area nearby. The community has been in long-term decline since its early-twentieth-century peak, though the school and church have been restored and a new restaurant replaced the former bar. No housing developments or commercial growth projects were identified.
The school serves kindergarten through eighth grade and is the sole school in the Little Heart 4 district. It is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet. Enrollment is very small, with only a handful of students per grade level, and the student body is entirely white. Data on free or reduced-price lunch, special education, and English learner populations was not available, so the economic and special-population picture is incomplete. A parent considering this school should know that class sizes are inherently tiny, which can mean close teacher attention but also very small peer groups for each grade.
State assessment results from the 2024-25 school year are available for a single year, so no trend can be drawn. In math, the proficiency rate is strong, well above what many rural schools post. In English language arts, the proficiency rate is lower, and a parent may want to look into this further with the school to understand what is driving the gap between the two subjects. Because the student body is so small, a single year's results can swing considerably, and the data should be read with that in mind. No additional academic performance summaries, course access information, staffing data, or attendance figures were provided.
The district brief turned up no recent parent-relevant changes such as referendums, curriculum shifts, or property tax adjustments. The district is extremely small, operating one school, and public reporting on it is thin. No neighbor comparison was available, so positioning this school against others in the area is not possible from the provided data. Civil rights data was not included. Because the school ends at eighth grade, there is no graduation rate to report.
Housing and rental data for the community was not available in the provided material. Saint Anthony has no residential subdivision pattern and consists of isolated structures on large rural lots connected by gravel and two-lane roads. Families looking at this area should expect a sparse rural setting where most practical errands and services require a drive to Mandan or Bismarck.
What the available evidence shows is a very small, rural, single-school district with a homogeneous student body, a strong math result, and a weaker ELA result in the one year of data reported. It fits families who want a quiet prairie setting and very small classes and who are comfortable with the trade-offs that come with a remote, low-population community: limited peer groups, few nearby amenities, and sparse public data to evaluate the school by. A family serious about this school would benefit from contacting the district directly to fill in the gaps the public data does not cover.
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