The top reported proficiency rate is 70% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Peter Cooper School
Peter Cooper School serves young learners from kindergarten through third grade in Ringwood, a residential borough set in the Ramapo Mountains about an hour northwest of New York City. This is a small public elementary school within the Ringwood School District, a system that educates students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade across four school buildings. Because Peter Cooper School covers only the earliest grades, it does not have a graduation rate or data on chronic absenteeism; families looking for high school outcomes will need to look to the regional arrangement Ringwood uses for grades nine through twelve.
The school’s student body of roughly 200 to 250 children is predominantly white, with a substantial Hispanic minority and small numbers of Black, Asian, multiracial, and Native American students. A low share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the borough’s overall affluence. Ringwood’s median household income is well above the national figure, and the community’s housing market is expensive. The typical home value in the area sits notably above both the state and national medians. With limited developable land due to large state parks, forests, and watershed protections, new housing construction appears constrained, and the borough’s population has been roughly stable after a modest decline from earlier decades. For a family considering a move, Ringwood offers a car-dependent, spread-out setting with lake communities, extensive trails, and no traditional downtown; borough hall and the schools are on separate campuses across the borough’s more than 25 square miles.
On state assessments, Peter Cooper School posted strong results. In both math and English language arts for third graders, more than two-thirds of students scored at the proficient level or above on the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments. That performance places the school in the top quarter of elementary-level schools across all districts in Passaic County when compared on a combined proficiency index. For context, the median school in the county falls well below this mark, and the top schools in the county did not reach this level either, so Peter Cooper’s showing is clearly on the high end locally. Parents should note that this is a single year of data for one grade level, but the pattern is favorable.
The district’s most recent budget, approved for the 2024-25 school year, carried a property tax increase that fell within the state’s annual cap. The school board has also received state approval for a long-range facilities plan, which projects modest enrollment growth through the end of the decade; state reviewers found the district’s current building capacity appropriate for those projections, so no major new construction is anticipated in the near term. Key cost drivers for the district include special education, transportation, and staff healthcare, which are typical for a suburban New Jersey district of this size.
The academic program at Peter Cooper is necessarily focused on foundational skills: reading, writing, and early mathematics. The school does not offer the advanced courses, career pathways, or extracurricular breadth that families would evaluate at the high school level, because it does not serve those grades. What the data shows is a small, community-grounded school where tested performance is strong and the peer group is relatively homogeneous in economic terms. For a parent of a kindergartner through third grader who wants a solid academic start in a stable, low-poverty setting, Peter Cooper School appears to deliver that, though families should verify any specific curricular approaches or enrichment offerings directly with the school, as that information was not available in the data reviewed.
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