The top reported proficiency rate is 13% in Science. The lowest is 3% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Boswell Ms
Boswell MS is a small public middle school in southeastern Oklahoma serving grades seven and eight. It is part of the Boswell district, a single consolidated prekindergarten-through-twelfth-grade system that sits at the center of an even smaller town. Boswell itself is a rural agricultural community in Choctaw County, located at the intersection of a state highway and U.S. Highway 70, a few miles west of Hugo. The town has been losing population over decades, and its commercial footprint is limited. A state park with a stocked lake lies within town limits, and an annual homecoming celebration has been a local tradition for generations. The school building is likely within or very near the town’s core, given the town’s small physical size and consolidated district structure.
The middle school enrolls a small number of students in just two grade levels. State testing data for the 2024-25 school year is incomplete, partly because the school is so small that many results are suppressed to protect student privacy. In grade seven, both math and English language arts proficiency rates were suppressed. In grade eight, where the tested group was larger, math results were also suppressed. However, grade eight English language arts shows a very low proficiency rate; only a small handful of students met the state’s proficient or above benchmark. Grade eight science results were similarly low. Across all tested subjects and grades, the school’s overall proficiency index places it in the bottom quarter among the five districts in Choctaw County. A parent reviewing these outcomes will want to note that the state changed its cut scores for math and English language arts in this testing cycle, which makes direct year-over-year comparisons unreliable. Even accounting for that, the reported results are weak.
Because Boswell MS serves only seventh and eighth graders, there is no graduation rate to evaluate. The school’s website and program offerings were not available in the data we reviewed, so course access, extracurricular opportunities, and support services such as special education or English learner programs are not described here. No discipline, staffing, or attendance data was found, either. The district itself appears stable at a basic level: no recent bond issues, curriculum changes, or tax shifts surfaced in publicly available records from the past few years.
The community context matters here. The town’s population has been declining for decades, and the housing market reflects that: home values in the zip code are below the state median and have decreased recently. The school is likely one of the larger local employers, but the economic base is thin. Families considering the area should be aware that the middle school’s academic results are very low relative to other districts in the same county, and the small enrollment means that some standard performance measures simply cannot be reported. A parent would be wise to ask the school directly about classroom instruction, academic intervention strategies, and what pathways exist for students after eighth grade, since this is a short two-year school within a small district that continues through high school. For a family already rooted in Boswell, this is the local school, and the student experience will be shaped by a very small peer group in a town that is quiet and shrinking.
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