The top reported proficiency rate is 27% in Science. The lowest is 13% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Barnsdall Middle School
Barnsdall Middle School serves grades six through eight in the Barnsdall district, a small, historically oil-founded town in Osage County. The town has experienced a long-term population decline, and its economic base took a severe hit in 2024 when a tornado destroyed the NuCera Solutions wax-and-polymers plant, the dominant local employer, leading to its permanent closure. The middle school itself is integrated into the compact town center; the district’s buildings were used as emergency shelters during the tornado. The school operates as a traditional public school with no charter or magnet designation.
The student body is small and racially diverse for a rural Oklahoma school, split roughly evenly between White students and American Indian or Alaska Native students, with a very small share of Hispanic students and an even smaller share of Black students. Data on the share of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the share receiving special education services, and the share classified as English learners were not available in the reporting, so a reader cannot determine the level of economic or learning-support need from this profile alone.
State testing results from the 2024-25 school year are available for most grades and subjects, though they must be read with a cautionary note. Oklahoma changed its cut scores for math and English language arts in this testing cycle, which makes direct year-over-year comparisons impossible. That acknowledged, the proficiency rates that were reported place this school at the lower end of performance. In sixth-grade math, about one in six students scored at or above the proficient level. In eighth-grade math, the figure was lower, roughly one in nine students. In English language arts, sixth-grade proficiency was about one in ten students, while eighth-grade came in at about one in six. The seventh-grade results for both math and English language arts were suppressed in the reporting, likely due to small group sizes, so there is no public data for that grade. In eighth-grade science, the strongest of the reported results, roughly a quarter of students met the proficiency bar.
When placed alongside other districts in Osage County, the school’s overall proficiency index falls into the bottom quartile. A parent considering this school will want to look into how the school supports students who are below grade level, what interventions are in place, and how the district’s post-tornado rebuilding efforts described in publicly reported sources are affecting the learning environment. The combination of a small student body, very low test scores, and a town facing a major economic contraction means this is a school where a family would want a direct conversation about academic expectations and available supports.
No information was available on course access, extracurricular offerings, discipline rates, or chronic absenteeism. The school does not serve high school grades, so there is no graduation rate to report. Given the thinness of the data on programs and school climate, families should rely on a campus visit and conversation with the principal to understand what a typical day looks like for a student here.
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