The reported proficiency rate for English language arts is 15%.
Original Research by School Decision on Spring Lake Colony Elementary
Spring Lake Colony Elementary sits in the rural country near Arlington, a small South Dakota town with deep Norwegian roots. Originally platted as Nordland by settlers who gave its streets Norwegian names, Arlington spans Kingsbury and Brookings counties in the east-central part of the state. The town retains its agricultural character, with a compact Main Street commercial core, residential streets radiating outward, and Lake Poinsett nearby to the northeast as a regional recreational draw. There is no public transit; daily life runs on cars. The community has an aging population typical of the rural Plains, and its numbers have drifted slightly downward over the long term, though a recent estimate suggests modest growth. An Arlington Community Development Corporation is active in town, and the weekly Arlington Sun has kept residents informed for generations.
This is a very small school. The name signals its setting: a colony school, almost certainly serving a Hutterite community, with an enrollment that fits in a single classroom grouping. All identified students are White. The grade span runs from kindergarten through eighth grade, though kindergarten currently has no enrolled students. The population is spread thinly across the upper grades, with a handful of children in each. Free-or-reduced-price lunch data was not reported, nor were counts for students with individualized education programs or English learners. Those gaps are common for colony schools, which operate under different reporting conditions than mainstream buildings, so the absence should not be read as an indication one way or the other.
Academic results are limited. English language arts is the only subject with a reported proficiency rate for the current year, and it is low, with only a small fraction of the tested group reaching the proficient threshold. Every eligible student participated, which is worth noting in a setting where small tested counts can make a single year's results swing sharply. Math and science results were suppressed, a standard practice when so few students sit for the assessment that reporting would risk identifying individuals. A parent considering this school may want to look into the ELA result further with the district, asking how instruction is structured across the combined grades and what support is available for literacy. With a single-room or near-single-room setting, the teacher's role and the curriculum materials in use carry enormous weight, and a direct conversation would tell a family more than any single test figure.
The school belongs to Oldham-Ramona-Rutland School District 39-6, a district formed in 2023 through the consolidation of two predecessor districts, Oldham-Ramona and Rutland. The merger drew together communities across Kingsbury, Lake, Miner, and Moody counties. Publicly reported information indicates that in 2025, a referendum on whether to dissolve the new district and break it apart was defeated by a razor-thin margin. That vote revealed genuine division among residents about whether the consolidation should hold. For a family thinking about the area, the uncertainty is real and worth understanding, though it may or may not affect day-to-day life at a colony school, which tends to operate with considerable independence from the broader district's administrative debates.
Housing in the surrounding zip code sits near the state benchmark, with values having risen at a brisk clip recently. Rent data was not available for this area. The estimated mortgage burden relative to income is manageable by national standards, and owning appears more affordable than renting where comparisons can be drawn, though rental options in a town this size are inherently thin. No major new subdivisions or housing developments surfaced in the available research, so the housing picture is one of an existing, modest stock in a quiet prairie community rather than a place in the midst of building out.
For a family whose life centers on a colony community, this school is the academic extension of that world: small, homogeneous, multi-grade, and embedded in an agricultural landscape. The academic data is thin and the one available proficiency figure is weak, so a parent would want to engage directly with the district about instruction and support. The district's recent consolidation fight adds a layer of governance uncertainty that families may want to watch.
See more original research from School Decision →