The top reported proficiency rate is 91% in Science. The lowest is 25% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Harvest Hills Elementary School
Harvest Hills Elementary School serves the Gretna Public Schools district, which is a fast-growing suburban system between Omaha and Lincoln. The school itself is a regular public elementary school covering pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, with an enrollment that is large enough to support multiple classrooms per grade.
The student body is overwhelmingly white, with a modest share of Hispanic students and small numbers of Asian, Black, and multiracial students. The share of students from low-income households, as measured by free and reduced-price lunch eligibility, is quite low. No data was available for students with disabilities or English learners, so a parent may want to ask the school directly about those populations and supports.
On the state assessments Nebraska gives in grades three through five, the school shows clear strengths and some soft spots. A very strong result came in fifth-grade science, where the large majority of students scored proficient. Fifth-grade math also posted a solid proficiency rate. In English language arts, all three tested grades showed proficiency rates that were decent but noticeably lower than the science result. The school's overall proficiency index, which averages all tested subjects and grades together, placed Harvest Hills in the bottom quartile among schools in Sarpy County. Because this comparison includes only a few county districts and the data comes from a single recent year, a parent may want to discuss this with the school, especially given the variation across grade levels. Multiple years of trend data were available but showed only a single year of results for most combinations, so it is hard to tell whether performance is improving or declining over time.
Gretna describes itself as a fast-growing suburban bedroom community, and the district has passed a series of large bonds in recent years to keep up. A bond built Palisades Elementary, which opened in 2023. A larger bond built the district's second high school, Gretna East, which opened in 2023 with grades nine and ten and is expanding one grade per year. The most recent bond, passed in 2024, funds a new elementary school that is expected to open in fall 2026, along with district-wide safety and security upgrades and land purchases for future sites. These projects reflect sustained enrollment growth and have made the district's bond levy among the highest in the state.
Housing values in the area are above both the state and national benchmarks, and rents are correspondingly above average. The area is suburban and car-dependent, with a small downtown but no walkability scores or transit information available in the sources. The district's rapid expansion means that feeder patterns and school capacities are shifting, so a family moving in should confirm which elementary school serves a given address and whether that assignment is expected to change.
Harvest Hills sits within a district that has been building aggressively to accommodate growth, and the school itself has a student body with very low poverty concentration. The test results are mixed: strong in science, solid in math for the upper grade, but weaker in English language arts across all grades, with an overall county-level comparison that suggests room for improvement. A parent weighing this school should ask how the school supports literacy development in the early grades and what the school's own internal trend data looks like now that the district has multiple elementary campuses.
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