Whitefield Elementary School, Whitefield NH

Original Research by School Decision on Whitefield Elementary School

Whitefield Elementary School sits in the village center of Whitefield, a small rural town on the northern edge of New Hampshire's White Mountains. The school serves prekindergarten through eighth grade as part of the White Mountains Regional School District, SAU 36, which also covers Carroll, Dalton, Jefferson, and Lancaster. It is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet, and its enrollment is modest for a school spanning that many grades. The student body is predominantly white, with small numbers of students from other racial and ethnic backgrounds. Nearly half the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which gives a sense of the economic context many families here are working in. Data on English learners and special education populations was not available, so those counts are left out rather than guessed.

The town itself clusters around the junction of US Route 3 and two state routes, with the Johns River running through the village. Walkability is limited mostly to this center, where civic and commercial uses sit close together. Outside it, the town opens into low-density residential and open land. The largest employers publicly reported include the Mountain View Grand hotel, Morrison Nursing Home, and Presby Plastics, with education also providing local jobs. The nearest hospital is Weeks Medical Center in Lancaster, about nine miles north. Public transit runs through North Country Transit, and the town has a volunteer fire department and full-time police. The Whitefield Public Library and a Recreation Department with a dedicated director serve as civic anchors. Mount Washington Regional Airport is located in town. Population figures suggest the community grew over several decades but has plateaued in recent years, with the latest estimates showing a slight dip from the prior census count. No major new housing developments were identified in available sources.

On state assessments, Whitefield Elementary's results run uneven across grades and subjects, with full participation in every tested group. In English language arts, proficiency is genuinely strong in some grades, with fifth and seventh graders showing well over half of tested students reaching proficiency. Those same grades in earlier and later years drop back, though, and fourth grade sits lower. Math is more of a struggle across the board. Most grades land around a third of students proficient or above, and sixth grade stands out as a particularly low point, with very few students reaching proficiency. Science, tested only in fifth and eighth grades, falls in between, with fifth grade performing better than eighth. The tested groups are small in each grade, which means a few students moving above or below the proficiency line can shift the picture considerably from year to year. Trend data was not available, so it is hard to say whether these results represent a stable pattern or year-to-year fluctuation. A parent looking at the sixth grade math result in particular may want to ask the school what is happening at that transition point and what support is in place.

The housing market in the school's zip code sits below the New Hampshire state benchmark and roughly in line with the national figure, with a slight year-over-year decline in typical home values. Mortgage costs at current rates absorb a meaningful share of a typical household income, which is consistent with the share of families qualifying for lunch assistance. Rental data was not available.

Several categories of information that would help round out a family's picture were absent. No data on course access, staffing ratios, discipline, attendance, or program offerings was provided. No civil-rights reporting was included. No comparison set against neighboring schools was available, so the school cannot be positioned against its county peers here. The district brief did not surface specific parent-relevant changes such as curriculum shifts, referendums, or budget moves in the recent period, and the search noted a lack of such reports rather than a lack of change. What is available paints Whitefield Elementary as a small, rural, prekindergarten-through-eighth school serving a working community in the northern White Mountains, with some bright spots in middle-grade reading and clear challenges in math that a family would want to understand before enrolling.

See more original research from School Decision →

Academic performance

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

Math

Grade 332%

School 32% · District 33% · ▼ 1 pts below district

▼ 22 pts below state median

Grade 427%

School 27% · District 32% · ▼ 5 pts below district

▼ 23 pts below state median

Grade 542%

School 42% · District 38% · ▲ 4 pts above district

▲ 3 pts above state median

Grade 64%

School 4% · District 33% · ▼ 29 pts below district

▼ 36 pts below state median

Grade 732%

School 32% · District 42% · ▼ 10 pts below district

▼ 6 pts below state median

Grade 832%

School 32% · District 40% · ▼ 8 pts below district

▼ 4 pts below state median

English language arts

Grade 332%

School 32% · District 36% · ▼ 4 pts below district

▼ 18 pts below state median

Grade 424%

School 24% · District 26% · ▼ 2 pts below district

▼ 29 pts below state median

Grade 558%

School 58% · District 49% · ▲ 9 pts above district

even with state median

Grade 627%

School 27% · District 47% · ▼ 20 pts below district

▼ 25 pts below state median

Grade 757%

School 57% · District 57%

▲ 1 pts above state median

Grade 843%

School 43% · District 43%

▼ 10 pts below state median

Science

Grade 545%

School 45% · District 37% · ▲ 8 pts above district

▲ 10 pts above state median

Grade 832%

School 32% · District 37% · ▼ 5 pts below district

▼ 4 pts below state median

This schoolWhite Mountains Regional School District, 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-income21%Higher-income45%24 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income7%Higher-income42%35 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income40%Higher-income72%32 pp gap

Grade 8Lower-income25%Higher-income56%31 pp gap

Mathematics

Grade 3Lower-income14%Higher-income55%41 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income14%Higher-income42%28 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income20%Higher-income61%41 pp gap

Grade 8Lower-income33%Higher-income31%2 pp gap