The top reported proficiency rate is 92% in Science. The lowest is 51% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Trumansburg Elementary School
Trumansburg Elementary School serves prekindergarten through fourth grade on a shared campus with the district's high school, situated off Whig Street on the south side of the village, separate from the commercial downtown along Main Street. It is a regular public elementary school within the Trumansburg Central School District, a small rural district in Tompkins County.
The school's enrollment is modest for its grade span, with students spread across prekindergarten through fourth grade. About a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which gives the school a mixed economic profile. The student body is predominantly white, with Hispanic students and students identifying as two or more races making up most of the remaining population. Data on English learners and students with IEPs was not available in what was provided.
State assessment results are available for third and fourth grade in math and ELA, with older science data for fourth grade. The picture that emerges is mixed. In math, third graders reached proficiency at a rate that is below where most parents would hope, while fourth graders performed meaningfully better, approaching two-thirds proficiency. ELA follows a similar pattern: third-grade proficiency sits in the mid-forties range, while fourth grade climbs into the upper fifties. Science data, though from an earlier school year, showed nearly all fourth graders scoring at proficient or above, which is a genuinely strong result. Against other districts in Tompkins County, the school's overall proficiency index sits above the midpoint of the nine-district comparison set, which gives some context to those figures. A parent would reasonably want to explore with the school how third-grade performance in reading and math is being supported, and what the trajectory looks like from year to year. Trend data was not available.
One development worth knowing: the district publicly reported in late 2025 that it is shifting elementary reading instruction toward a Science of Reading approach and has been holding family informational sessions about the change. This is a meaningful shift in how early literacy is taught, and families enrolling a young child now will be entering during that transition period.
The school's physical setting will also change over the next few years. District voters approved a capital project in late 2025 covering infrastructure, security improvements, additional air conditioning, student safety sidewalks, and accessibility upgrades. Most of the cost is expected to be covered through state building aid and an existing capital reserve fund the district established a few years earlier, with limited tax impact. The improvements will directly affect the buildings children use.
Trumansburg itself is a compact Finger Lakes village with a walkable downtown, a weekly farmers' market with live music, and the annual GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance as its most publicly reported cultural event. The village's character is artistic and community-oriented, with a Main Street lined with restaurants, a natural grocery, a coffee shop, and local shops. Taughannock Falls State Park is nearby, and a TCAT bus route connects the village to Ithaca and Cornell. Publicly reported data shows that many residents commute out to Ithaca-area employment.
The housing market around the school runs below the statewide benchmark by a meaningful margin, though values have been rising steadily year over year. A new affordable housing development on the village's south side, completed in late 2024, added dozens of rental units and is part of a larger mixed-income build-out that will include market-rate for-sale homes. That growth adds families to the community and may affect enrollment in coming years.
For a family weighing this placement: the school is a small community elementary in an arts-oriented village, with test results that are solid relative to Tompkins County peers but show real variation by grade, particularly in third grade ELA and math. The reading instruction shift and the upcoming facilities work are both live developments that a parent would benefit from asking about directly.
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