The reported proficiency rate for Math is 76%.
Original Research by School Decision on Thomas-fay-custer Unified Jhs
Thomas-Fay-Custer Unified JHS sits in the small rural community of Thomas, Oklahoma, serving seventh through ninth graders. The school is one piece of the Thomas-Fay-Custer Unified District, which also operates elementary schools and a high school. With a modest enrollment, the junior high school is small enough that most families in town would know the staff and each other. The student body is predominantly white, with a noticeable Hispanic presence and a smaller American Indian group; roughly a tenth of students are American Indian. The school does not serve grades beyond ninth, so there is no graduation rate to report here. The building shares the town’s compact footprint—Thomas has a downtown core with a library, a park, and a weekly newspaper, and the school complex is integrated into that fabric rather than set apart.
State testing data is thin for this school, and the reasons are tied to its size. For the 2024-25 school year, only one grade-level subject result was reported without suppression: seventh-grade math, where a clear majority of students scored at the proficient level or above. Every other tested subject and grade—eighth-grade math, seventh- and eighth-grade English language arts, and eighth-grade science—had results suppressed. Suppression typically occurs when the tested group is too small to report publicly without risking student identification, which is a common pattern for small schools. There is no way to know how students performed in those subjects, so a parent evaluating academic performance here will have to work from that single math score and talk to the school directly about other outcomes.
The single reported result, however, places this school’s overall proficiency index in the top quartile when compared with other districts in Custer County. That is a strong position, but it rests on a narrow base. The other districts in the county have more complete data, so the comparison should be approached with caution. The school’s own students took the tests; the numbers just cannot be shared. A parent may want to ask the school for internal summaries or classroom-level indicators to round out the picture.
Thomas itself is a bedroom community. A substantial share of employed residents commute elsewhere for work, and the town’s population has been declining slowly over recent years. Housing values have risen modestly, but the area remains affordable relative to state and national benchmarks. The largest local employer is a small oil refinery, which was revived recently and brought a handful of jobs, but the school district itself is also a significant employer. For families, this means the school is likely a stable institution in a town that is not growing but is not shrinking sharply either.
No recent district-level changes of lasting impact were found in publicly available sources. The school appears to operate without major recent upheavals, though the absence of reported changes does not mean nothing is happening—it means nothing surfaced in the search.
Because the school serves only three grades and has a small enrollment, the academic picture is necessarily incomplete. The one piece of tested evidence is encouraging, but it covers only one subject in one grade. Families who want a fuller view of how this school supports learning in English, science, and higher-level math should seek that information from the school office or through parent networks. The school’s size and rural setting mean that personal relationships, teacher visibility, and community connection may matter as much as any test score, and those are elements a data profile cannot capture.
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