The top reported proficiency rate is 0% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Homer High School
Homer High School serves about 190 students in grades seven through twelve. It is the sole secondary school in the Homer Community Schools district, a small rural district that sits in the far eastern edge of Nebraska within the Sioux City metro area. The building itself is on South 3rd Street in the village of Homer, a compact village with a low-density grid of single-family homes and a handful of commercial buildings. The school is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet.
The student body is predominantly white, with a notable share of American Indian or Alaska Native students as well. Roughly half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a marker that tells a parent the school serves a moderate-income community. The village itself is very small and has experienced slight population decline in recent years, and the housing stock is largely owner-occupied with median home values that are below the state average. Families considering a move here should be prepared for a quiet, rural setting with limited commercial amenities within the village itself; many residents commute to nearby Sioux City for work and services.
State testing results available for the 2024-25 school year show that no students met the proficiency standard in math at either seventh or eighth grade, the two grades tested. The same was true for science in eighth grade. In English language arts, the combined proficiency rate across tested grades was just below fifty percent. These are very low attainment figures, and a parent should look into this further with the school, particularly around how the school supports students who are below grade level and what the curriculum and instructional approach look like in math and science. The data covers only grades seven and eight for state assessments, so there is no publicly reported testing profile for high school students at this school. That gap is not unusual in a school that offers higher grades, but it does mean the academic picture for ninth through twelfth graders is not visible through this data.
The comparison to other districts in Dakota County places Homer High School in the bottom quartile for overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades. The county has only two districts, so that placement tells a parent this is the lower-performing of the two on the metrics available. No graduation rate was available in the data, so a parent should ask the district directly what its four-year graduation rate is and how it tracks on-time completion.
The district recently undertook a significant capital construction project, with a large expenditure on facilities relative to its size. That suggests the physical plant has seen recent investment, which could mean updated classrooms, labs, or other spaces. No details about what was built or renovated were found in public search results, so a parent may want to ask the district office what the project included and whether it touched the high school building specifically.
For a family weighing this school, the profile is of a very small rural secondary school where academic performance on state tests is weak in the middle grades, and where the high school years are less documented in the available data. The community is quiet and shrinking slightly, and the housing market is relatively affordable compared to state and national benchmarks. The school may fit a family that values a small, close-knit setting in a rural village and is willing to engage directly with the school to understand academic supports and outcomes beyond what the state test scores show. A family looking for strong measured academic performance at the middle school level or a track record of high school readiness will want to gather more information directly from the district.
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