The top reported proficiency rate is 31% in English language arts. The lowest is 6% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Duke Es
Duke ES serves students from prekindergarten through eighth grade in the small, rural town of Duke in southwestern Oklahoma. It is one of two schools in the Duke district, which also includes Duke High School. The elementary school is the only option in the district for students in the PK-8 grade range.
Duke is a town with a historically agrarian character, situated at the intersection of US Route 62 and Oklahoma State Highway 34. Its population has been in a steady decline over recent decades, and the town has a very small commercial core near that highway intersection. For employment and services, residents typically look about 14 miles east to Altus. The elementary school is located within the town itself, consistent with the community’s modest footprint.
With a small overall enrollment, Duke ES is a genuinely intimate setting. The student body is majority white, with a substantial Hispanic population; there are very small numbers of American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, and multiracial students. Because this school serves grades PK-8, state testing data is available only for the grades tested under Oklahoma’s assessment, which begin in third grade. For the most recent testing year, results were thin. For several grade levels in math, English language arts, and science, the proficiency rate was suppressed due to very small group sizes. Only two grade-level results were reported in full. In seventh-grade math, about an eighth of students scored proficient or above. In seventh-grade English language arts, roughly a third of students scored proficient or above. For eighth-grade math, no students who were tested reached the proficient mark. No testing data was available for grades three through five or for grade six, and science results in grades five and eight were also suppressed. A parent looking for a broader picture of academic performance will find the available evidence is very limited, not because the school avoids testing but because the number of students in each grade is extremely small. This is a place where one or two strong years would change the reported proficiency numbers substantially, and the same is true for one or two weak years.
The school’s context relative to other districts in Jackson County places its overall proficiency index right at the midpoint of the small set of county districts. That is a single snapshot and should be read alongside the fact that for most individual grade-subject combinations there is no data to compare.
No graduation rate is reported, which is expected for a school that does not serve grade twelve. Information on chronic absenteeism was not available. Free or reduced-price lunch data was also missing from the profile. The district has no publicly reported recent changes, such as referendums or curriculum shifts, that would alter a family’s day-to-day experience. The civil rights data, including special education and English learner counts, was not reported for this school.
Duke ES fits a family looking for a very small, rural school where their child will likely know nearly every classmate and teacher across multiple grade levels. The trade-off is that with enrollment this small, academic programming is necessarily limited in the range of elective and advanced course offerings that a larger school would provide. The only available test results point to low proficiency in the middle-school grades, which a parent may want to look into further with the school. For a family already living in or moving to the Duke area, this is the PK-8 public school option, and its size and setting define the academic experience more than any single program.
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