North Park Elementary School, Broken Bow NE

Original Research by School Decision on North Park Elementary School

North Park Elementary School serves students from prekindergarten through fifth grade in Broken Bow, the county seat of Custer County and the largest city in this central Nebraska region. The town functions as a regional hub for commerce and shopping, with a historic public square at its center. Agriculture dominates the local economy; Nebraska’s largest cattle feedlot sits just south of town, and a family-owned feed store has operated here for decades. The population has declined over recent decades, though the city describes itself as progressing, with a new sports facility and park improvements. The district, Broken Bow Public Schools, oversees this elementary campus and did not show recent changes of lasting impact in publicly reported searches.

North Park is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet. Its enrollment draws from the surrounding community, and a substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is predominantly white, with a modest Hispanic representation and smaller numbers of students who identify as Asian, two or more races, American Indian or Alaska Native, or Black. The school serves a range from prekindergarten through fifth grade, and its enrollment is small enough that each grade has a single class grouping.

State testing results for the most recent school year show a pattern that varies by grade and subject. In third grade, a strong majority of students met proficiency benchmarks in both math and English language arts. That performance drops off sharply in fourth and fifth grade math, where no students reached the proficiency threshold. English language arts results in fourth and fifth grade sit in a middle range, with just over half of fifth graders at proficiency. Fifth grade science, by contrast, posted a high proficiency rate. The steep decline in math from third to fourth grade is a soft spot that a parent may want to look into further with the school. There was only a single year of data available for this analysis, so no trend of improvement or decline could be established across multiple years. The school sits inside a county with few other elementary schools that report comparable testing data, which limits how it can be placed against its neighbors.

The school itself is located on North H Street in Broken Bow. The town’s built environment is compact and centered on its public square, which has served as the community’s gathering place since the 1800s and still hosts summer evening entertainment. Daily life in this rural setting is automobile-dependent, though the core is walkable. The district did not report discipline data, staffing ratios, chronic absenteeism rates, or special education and English learner counts, so these dimensions of school environment are not available for this account.

For a family considering North Park, the key takeaways are the school’s role as the sole elementary campus within a small district in a rural county seat. Test performance is uneven, with strong early-grade literacy and third-grade math alongside a puzzling collapse in upper-grade math. The community has a stable agricultural economic base, a historic downtown, and a slowly shrinking population. Parents who value a small, locally rooted school may find this a fit, though those with concerns about math instruction beyond third grade will want to ask the school directly about curriculum and support.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 373%

School 73% · District 82% · ▼ 9 pts below district

▲ 73 pts above state median

Grade 40%

School 0% · District 79% · ▼ 79 pts below district

even with state median

Grade 50%

School 0% · District 89% · ▼ 89 pts below district

even with state median

English language arts

Grade 369%

School 69% · District 81% · ▼ 12 pts below district

▲ 69 pts above state median

Grade 456%

School 56% · District 76% · ▼ 19 pts below district

▲ 17 pts above state median

Grade 551%

School 51% · District 78% · ▼ 27 pts below district

▲ 51 pts above state median

Science

Grade 584%

School 84% · district not reported

▲ 84 pts above state median

This schoolBROKEN BOW PUBLIC SCHOOLS, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.

Proficiency by household income

English language arts

Grade 3Lower-income74%Higher-income85%11 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income67%Higher-income68%1 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income71%Higher-income83%12 pp gap

Mathematics

Grade 3Lower-income74%Higher-income87%13 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income74%Higher-income74%1 pp gap