The top reported proficiency rate is 45% in Math. The lowest is 35% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Will Rogers Es
Will Rogers Elementary serves as one of the primary schools in the McAlester district, and a parent looking at this school should start with one important note: the school’s stated grade span is kindergarten through second grade. Yet the state testing data reported here covers third and fourth graders, which creates a mismatch a family will want to clarify directly with the district or school office. The enrollment is substantial for the grade band it officially covers, and the student body is diverse. White students make up the largest share, followed by comparable-sized groups of students who identify as two or more races, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Hispanic. Smaller shares are Black, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. No data was available on the share of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals, on students with disabilities, or on English learners, so a reader interested in those support areas will need to ask the school for current figures.
McAlester itself is the county seat of Pittsburg County, a historic trade center in southeast Oklahoma with an economy anchored by the state penitentiary and a major Army ammunition plant. Housing in the area is well below the national typical home value, and the local unemployment rate has been running close to the national average. The city is auto-oriented, with a historic downtown and some revitalization efforts through a Main Street program, but no major new housing developments were noted in publicly reported sources. The population has been stable to slightly declining in recent decades. For a family, this is a community with deep roots and stable employment sectors rather than rapid growth.
On academic performance, the school’s proficiency index — a composite of the available test results in math and English language arts for third and fourth grades — places Will Rogers in the top quarter of all schools in Pittsburg County. That is a strong relative position. The individual grade-level results show a typical pattern: in third grade, roughly half of students met the state proficiency bar in math, and a somewhat smaller share did so in English language arts. By fourth grade, the proficiency rates were lower in both subjects. That drop is common in many schools as content demands increase, but a parent may want to ask how the school addresses this transition. Because the school does not serve grades beyond fourth (and by its own grade band, not beyond second), there is no graduation rate, no data on college readiness or career pathways, and no information on chronic absenteeism. Those simply do not apply here.
No information was available on class sizes, teacher qualifications, or the school’s approach to discipline. The district brief found no recent large-scale changes of lasting impact to report, so a parent should check directly for any program shifts or facility plans. Will Rogers is a neighborhood school that draws a racially and economically varied group of young students. For a family looking for an early-elementary setting in a midsized county-seat town with affordable housing and a stable population, the school’s comparative standing in the county is a positive signal. The gap between the stated grade band and the testing data, along with the absence of key demographic and support-service numbers, are the details worth pursuing first.
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