The top reported proficiency rate is 30% in English language arts. The lowest is 27% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Dawes Avenue Elementary School
Dawes Avenue Elementary School serves Somers Point, a closely settled Atlantic County city that lines the Great Egg Harbor Bay. The city itself is primarily residential, with a bayfront commercial strip of marinas, restaurants, and medical offices; Shore Medical Center is the largest employer. The school building sits within a compact community that has a bayfront historic district, a repurposed rail trail, and direct bridge connections to Ocean City and Cape May County. Recent infrastructure work has included a major causeway reconstruction and a new Garden State Parkway bridge.
The school serves prekindergarten through third grade, which means it covers only the earliest years of elementary education. That grade span shapes nearly everything about what a parent should expect here. There is no state testing data for prekindergarten, kindergarten, first, or second grade. The only state assessment results available come from a single grade level, third grade, and those results show that just over a quarter of third graders scored proficient or above in math, and just under a third did so in English language arts. These are the only tested-year results from the most recent assessment cycle. Because the school has no fourth grade or beyond, there is no data on how the same cohort would have performed in later years, and no graduation rate can be calculated for this school at all.
About three in every five students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which is a substantial share. The student body is roughly a third white, a third Hispanic, and about a sixth Black, with the remaining students identifying as multiracial or other racial groups. Class sizes appear moderate for a school of its grade band.
The academic picture is limited to a single year and a single tested grade, so parents should not draw long-term conclusions from it. But within that narrow window, the proficiency rates in both math and reading sit below the midpoint when compared to other districts across Atlantic County. A parent may want to ask the school how it tracks early literacy and numeracy growth in the untested primary grades, and how it supports students who may be below grade-level benchmarks by third grade.
There is no publicly reported information about chronic absenteeism, discipline, or staffing for this school. Those gaps are common for schools that serve only early grades, where data collection and reporting often focus on older students.
Somers Point itself is a modestly sized community, and the school district handles the early elementary years at Dawes before students move on to a different building for the upper grades. The district has not recently undergone any structural changes that would be visible to parents, beyond a grade reconfiguration that falls outside the most recent four-year window. For a family trying to understand the elementary option in Somers Point, this school is the entry point for the district's youngest learners, and the evidence available on academic outcomes is thin and confined to one grade level. Anyone evaluating this school should seek information from the district about literacy and math programming in kindergarten through second grade, and about how the school identifies and supports students who are struggling before they ever sit for a state test.
See more original research from School Decision →