The top reported proficiency rate is 49% in Science. The lowest is 34% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Carthage Elementary
Carthage Elementary serves pre-kindergarten through fourth grade in Smith County, a school district based in the small county-seat town of Carthage, Tennessee. The building sits near the town center, within walking distance of the historic courthouse square. This is a traditional small-town arrangement: schools, government offices, and the modest downtown commercial district are clustered together rather than separated on distant campuses. The town sits on the north bank of the Cumberland River and is part of the Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area, though its character is distinctly rural and slow-growing, with a population that has been essentially flat in recent years.
The school enrolls a student body that is predominantly white, with a smaller share of students identifying as two or more races and a modest number of Hispanic and Black students. The elementary serves only grades PK through four, so it has no graduation rate and no course offerings like Advanced Placement or career pathways; those begin later in the district. State testing is administered in grades three and four, and the school saw full participation in the most recent TNReady assessments.
On the 2024-25 TNReady results, a moderate share of students met the state's proficiency bar in math, with a slightly lower share doing so in English language arts. Performance in science was stronger, with roughly half of tested students reaching the proficient or above level. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, particularly around literacy support in the early grades, given the gap between math and ELA outcomes. A social studies result reported from 2017-18, the most recent available, is too old to be meaningful for current assessment.
The district, Smith County, passed a budget for the 2024-25 school year without a property tax increase, and included a raise for all employees, a step increase for teachers, funding for a new school resource officer position, and additional instructional technology. Those are concrete decisions that affect family cost of living and school safety presence. The district has also been discussing, for a few years, the possibility of building a new middle school facility; that discussion continued in budget work sessions in 2024, though no final approval had been reached.
The town of Carthage is a small county seat with a historic courthouse square, a short drive from the Cordell Hull Lake impoundment and the Cumberland River. The housing market in the local ZIP code shows home values moderately below the national and state benchmarks, and the area is more affordable than the broader Nashville metro. The town provides water, sewer, and garbage utilities. No public transit system was identified, and residents rely on state highways for travel.
Because Carthage Elementary is a primary-level school, many of the measures that parents look for in high schools do not apply here. There is no high-stakes graduation metric, no chronic absenteeism data was reported, and no staffing ratios were available. The civil rights data was also absent. What is clear is that this is a small, traditional elementary school in a stable, low-growth rural county seat, serving its neighborhood families through fourth grade before students move on to Smith County's middle and high schools. The academic picture is mixed, with math and science proficiency outpacing reading by a notable margin, which is the kind of pattern a parent might want to discuss directly with the principal.
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