The top reported proficiency rate is 58% in Math. The lowest is 55% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Castle Heights School
Castle Heights School serves kindergarten through grade five in Price, a city that functions as a regional hub for eastern Utah. Price is the county seat of Carbon County, with a history rooted in coal mining and railroad work that gave the town a notably diverse population. Today the city has a college campus, a hospital, and a downtown core along Main Street where civic and cultural anchors like City Hall and the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum are located. The school is one of two public elementary schools in Price, and it feeds into Mont Harmon Middle School and Carbon High School.
The school’s enrollment is moderate for an elementary serving those grades, with the largest single grade at the fifth grade level. Most students are white, and about one in ten students is Hispanic. Just under half of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, a share that families may want to consider when thinking about the socioeconomic mix of the school. Data on students with an individualized education plan and English learners was not available, so readers who rely on those measures for placement decisions would need to ask the school directly.
State testing results come from Utah’s RISE assessments. On the math test, more than half of students scored at or above the proficient level. In English language arts, a little over half of students were proficient. Science results were similar, with just over half of students meeting the proficiency bar. State cut scores for English language arts changed in a recent year, so comparisons to earlier years may not be straightforward. Even so, the available numbers place Castle Heights above the midpoint among the districts in Carbon County in overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades, and it sits in the top quarter of the county-based comparison group. That is a strong relative position given that the comparison set includes only two districts, but it still signals that this school is outperforming other area schools in the county on average.
Because Castle Heights is an elementary school, many metrics that apply to secondary schools are absent here. There is no graduation rate, no advanced course access, and no postsecondary readiness data. Those gaps are expected for a school that serves only kindergarten through grade five, and a parent looking for that kind of information would want to look to the middle and high school levels in the district.
The housing market in Price is more affordable than the state and national benchmarks, and Price itself is a small city in a rural county. The district brief shows no recently reported changes of lasting impact at the district level, so the context for families is a stable one without major policy or boundary shifts on the horizon.
For a family considering Castle Heights, the picture is of a solid elementary school in a small regional center, with proficiency results that are ahead of the very small set of local comparisons. The school serves a community with modest economic diversity, and the housing affordability in Price may be a draw for families who want to live in a place with a distinct history and ready access to outdoor recreation. The main open question a parent would want to explore further is how the school meets the needs of students with disabilities and English learners, since that information was not available in state data.
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