Original Research by School Decision on Clark Colony Elementary - 05
Clark Colony Elementary - 05 sits in Raymond, South Dakota, an extremely small rural town in Clark County on the Great Plains. The town is agricultural in character, with minimal commercial activity and a population that has grown only slightly since the last census. Publicly reported sources describe Raymond as primarily residential, with civic life centered on a municipal building and post office. The town is situated roughly forty miles west of Watertown. Raymond's own historical school closed decades ago, and the surrounding area has seen further school consolidation over the years, so families here are accustomed to schooling arrangements that reflect the realities of sparse rural settlement.
Clark Colony Elementary serves grades kindergarten through eighth and is part of the Doland School District 56-2. The enrollment is very small, consistent with what one would expect for a single-building rural school in this setting. All identified students are white. No free-or-reduced-price lunch data was reported, and no information on special education or English learner populations was available. We looked for those figures and found they were missing from the source data, so we cannot characterize the economic or special-population profile of the student body.
State assessment results for math, English language arts, and science were suppressed for the most recent reporting period. This means proficiency rates, tested counts, and participation rates are all unavailable. In a school of this size, suppression almost always reflects student privacy protections tied to very small tested groups rather than a performance concern. A parent may want to ask the school or district directly how students are progressing, since the published numbers do not provide a picture. We looked for multi-year trend data and found none available for the same reason.
Because this school ends at eighth grade, there is no graduation rate to report. That metric applies to high schools, and Clark Colony Elementary does not serve those grades. No course access, staffing, attendance, or discipline data was provided, and no civil rights data was available, so we cannot speak to those dimensions of the school environment. Program offerings were not reported either, which leaves a gap for families trying to understand what the academic day looks like beyond the basic grade configuration.
No neighbor comparison data was available for this school, so we cannot position it against nearby schools in the county. The Doland School District, which oversees Clark Colony Elementary, is itself a small rural district. Publicly reported research on district-level changes found little of lasting impact, so there are no recent district-level initiatives or shifts we can point to.
What the available data does tell a parent is fairly simple. This is a very small, rural, single-building school serving a tight-knit community in an agricultural part of South Dakota. The student body is small enough that the state does not publish test scores for it, which is common and not unusual for a school of this scale. Families considering Clark Colony Elementary would benefit from direct conversation with the school and district staff about academics, daily routines, and support services, since the publicly available data is thin and does not fill in those details on its own. The surrounding community is quiet, agricultural, and sparsely populated, which shapes what the school experience is likely to be.
See more original research from School Decision →