The top reported proficiency rate is 92% in Science. The lowest is 73% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Howard El Sch
Howard Elementary School serves kindergarten through fifth grade in the small borough of Howard in Centre County's Bald Eagle Valley. The school is part of the Bald Eagle Area School District, whose middle and high school sit on a campus several miles away in Wingate. Howard itself is a compact, residential village of roughly a few hundred people on a peninsula near Foster Joseph Sayers Reservoir, anchored by Bald Eagle State Park and its trails, lake, and recreational programming. The borough is not growing; population has held steady or declined slightly over decades. The area is rural and lake-oriented rather than developed, though home values sit modestly below the state benchmark.
The school's enrollment is small, with just over a hundred students spread across the six grades. Roughly four in ten students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is overwhelmingly white, with only a couple of students reporting multiracial identity and no reported students of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. No enrollment data was available for students with disabilities or English learners.
In the most recent state assessment results available, Howard Elementary's proficiency in math stands solidly above the midpoint among Centre County's districts. In reading and language arts, proficiency is lower. The science assessment, reported on a smaller cohort from the prior year, showed notably higher performance. Trend data was not available, so it is not possible to determine whether these results reflect a stable pattern or recent change.
The district has completed a substantial facilities investment opened in fall 2025, which added a new forestry building, a fitness center, and a dedicated student services office on the middle and high school campus. The forestry building allows the district to offer hands-on career and technical education in agriculture, forestry, and wildlife management in-house rather than requiring students to travel to an external vocational program, which preserves instructional time and expands local pathway options. The district also held school property taxes flat for two consecutive years, a signal of fiscal restraint that affects families across all four towns it serves. These are concrete, lasting district-level changes that shape what families experience here.
A parent considering Howard Elementary should recognize this as a small elementary school in a small, stable rural community. The math proficiency is solid; the reading results suggest an area to look into further with the school. The immediate context is quiet residential, with recreation and civic life oriented toward the state park rather than a traditional downtown. The school itself is embedded in a district that has made recent investments in vocational and athletic facilities and maintained tax stability, so the trajectory locally is one of deliberate care rather than rapid change or strain.
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