Original Research by School Decision on Our Home
Our Home sits in Parkston, a small rural town in Hutchinson County, South Dakota, where agricultural farmland surrounds a compact Main Street grid. The town's civic life clusters along that main corridor, with the public library, city hall, and post office all within easy reach. A preserved one-room country school stands in the east park as a museum, a quiet reminder of the area's educational roots. The town brands itself "A Great Place to Grow," and its economy draws on manufacturing alongside medical, retail, and educational services. Publicly reported population figures show a gentle decline, and no major new housing or commercial construction surfaced in available sources. The broader housing market here is modest relative to both state and national benchmarks, and affordability looks reasonable for the area. Rental data was not available.
Our Home serves grades five through twelve within the Parkston School District 33-3, though its enrollment is concentrated in the upper grades, with no students recorded in grades five or six. The total enrollment is very small, and nearly all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is predominantly white, with a notable share of American Indian or Alaska Native students and a small number of Hispanic students. Data on individualized education programs and English learner status was not available, so we cannot characterize those populations from what was provided.
The school's profile, its name, and the pattern of its data all point toward an alternative or special-purpose placement rather than a conventional comprehensive school. The enrollment is tiny even for a small rural district, and the tested counts in state assessments are so low that proficiency rates were suppressed across every subject and grade. A handful of students sat for the eighth-grade math and ELA assessments, with participation at about half the enrolled group. Seventh-grade tested counts were even smaller. Science results for eighth grade were also suppressed. These suppression patterns are what you would expect when a school serves a specialized or alternative population, and a parent reading a missing result here should not read it as a weak one. Still, the state assessment data does not give us a usable picture of academic performance at this school, and that is a gap we name plainly rather than fill.
No graduation rate, civil-rights data, course-access information, staffing figures, or discipline records were provided. Program offerings were not listed. The district brief turned up no parent-relevant changes such as curriculum shifts, referendums, or tax moves in recent reporting. Without these pieces, we cannot speak to what Advanced Placement, dual-credit, career-pathway, or extracurricular options exist here, if any. A parent considering this school would want to ask the district directly about academic programming, support services, and what a typical student's day looks like.
What we can say is that Our Home occupies a distinct niche within the Parkston district. Its very small size and the high concentration of economic need among its students suggest a setting designed for individualized attention, likely serving students whose needs were not met in a traditional classroom. For a family whose child would benefit from a small, closely supervised environment, that structure may be the point. For a family seeking a broad catalog of electives, competitive athletics, or a large peer cohort, this school is unlikely to provide those, and the district's main campus would be the more natural place to look.
Parkston itself offers the backdrop of a quiet, affordable rural community with a stable identity and modest housing costs. The town has no public transit, and the surrounding region is open farmland. Families drawn to small-town life will recognize the setting. Whether Our Home fits a particular child depends almost entirely on why the school exists in this student's educational plan, and that is a conversation best held with the district before any decision is made.
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