Original Research by School Decision on Rugby Ely Elementary School
Rugby Ely Elementary School sits in the small city of Rugby, the seat of Pierce County on North Dakota's northern plains. The town carries a quiet civic identity. A historic courthouse anchors the downtown along Main Avenue, and the City Armory serves as the meeting place for city council. The Prairie Village Museum preserves some of the county's oldest buildings and artifacts, including a Great Northern Railroad depot, giving the community a tangible link to its railroad and frontier past. Little Flower Catholic School operates alongside the public system, giving families a parochial alternative. Public schools here fall under Rugby 5, a district that recently invested heavily in facilities, with a major construction project reflecting a commitment to updating the spaces where children learn.
Ely Elementary serves pre-kindergarten through sixth grade as a regular public school. Enrollment is modest, with roughly three dozen students per grade, which generally means students are known by name and teachers can track each child's progress closely. The student body is predominantly white, with the next largest group being American Indian and Alaska Native students, followed by smaller Hispanic, Asian, Black, and multiracial populations. About a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a moderate share for the region. The school does not report data on English learners or students receiving special education services, so parents whose children need those supports should ask the school directly about what is available.
On state testing, the picture is mixed and comes with an important caveat. The 2024-25 results come from the ND A-PLUS assessment, a new test with revised proficiency cut scores, which means this year's numbers cannot be reliably compared to prior years. The state reports proficiency as ranges rather than precise figures, and the school's results vary widely by grade and subject. In English language arts, third graders performed comparatively well, landing in the upper portion of the reported range, while fourth and sixth graders showed lower proficiency. Math followed a similar pattern, with fourth grade a clear soft spot and older grades generally stronger, eighth-grade math reaching a relatively high band if those results reflect students still connected to this school. Science results were middling across the tested grades. Taken together, the school's overall proficiency sits around the middle of the range for all three subjects, with real strength in the earliest tested grades and some concern in the middle elementary years. Participation was strong across every grade and subject, which means the results reflect nearly the full student body.
A parent reading these results may want to look into how the school supports students in fourth and fifth grade, where both math and reading proficiency dip. The range-based reporting makes it hard to pin down exact performance, and the transition to a new assessment means the state itself flags these results as not yet comparable to past years. Asking the principal or district office about grade-level supports, intervention programs, and how teachers are adjusting to the new test would give a clearer picture than the public data alone can.
Because Ely Elementary ends at sixth grade, there is no graduation rate to report, and the school does not offer AP, dual-credit, or career pathways, which are features of the high school that follows. What parents are choosing here is a small-town elementary experience with steady class sizes, a recently upgraded physical plant, and a community where the school sits at the center of civic life. Housing in Rugby is affordable relative to both state and national benchmarks, with home values well below the North Dakota median and far below the national figure. Rental data was not available, so families looking to rent should check local listings directly. For a family drawn to a close-knit community where the school is a known quantity and the cost of living is low, Ely Elementary offers a grounded option, with the caveat that academic results are still settling under a new state testing system.
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