The reported proficiency rate for Science is 53%.
Original Research by School Decision on Bingham Memorial School
Bingham Memorial School sits in Cornwall, a small rural town in Vermont's Champlain Valley where dairy farms and hayfields stretch toward Adirondack views to the west. The town has resisted the suburban development that has reshaped other Champlain Valley communities, and its civic life centers on the Town Hall and the school itself, with Town Meeting Day in March serving as the main gathering point for residents. Cornwall shares a border with Middlebury, the county seat and home to Middlebury College, and the two towns have long been economically and culturally linked. No major employers sit within Cornwall; residents who work tend to commute to Middlebury. The town has no traditional downtown commercial district, and the built environment is dispersed homes and farms along rural roads rather than a walkable center.
Bingham Memorial serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grade and is part of the Addison Central Unified Union School District. After fifth grade, students move on to Middlebury Union Middle School and then Middlebury Union High School in neighboring Middlebury, so families should expect that older children will travel outside Cornwall for school. The school's enrollment is small, as one would expect for a town of this size, and the student body is nearly entirely white. A modest share of students qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. Data on individualized education programs and English learner status was not available, so we cannot characterize those populations here. The school is not a charter or magnet school.
State assessment results for the most recent year were largely suppressed in math and English language arts across third, fourth, and fifth grades. This suppression is common in Vermont when the number of tested students in a given grade falls below state privacy thresholds, and it often reflects the small scale of a school like this rather than any absence of testing. The one result that was reported is fifth-grade science, where roughly half of tested students reached proficiency. That single data point gives a limited window into academic performance, and a parent may want to ask the school directly about how students are progressing in reading and math, since those results are not visible in the public data.
Because Bingham Memorial serves only elementary grades, there is no graduation rate to report. The neighbor comparison set, which positions this school relative to districts in Addison County, could not produce a proficiency index because the comparable cohort was too small. Chronic absenteeism data was also not available for this school.
Housing in Cornwall carries a premium relative to both state and national benchmarks, with typical home values sitting well above the Vermont median and the national median. The estimated monthly mortgage cost for a typical home, assuming a conventional down payment at current rates, is substantial. Rental data was not available for this area. The price-to-income ratio is elevated, meaning that buying a home here requires a relatively strong household income compared with much of the country. Cornwall's housing market reflects its appeal as a quiet rural community adjacent to Middlebury's amenities, and the town's deliberate resistance to new development has kept supply tight.
For a family considering Bingham Memorial, the picture is one of a very small, community-rooted elementary school in a town that values its agricultural character and close ties to Middlebury. The academic data is thin in publicly reported form, which limits what can be said from the outside. What is visible is a school serving a small, fairly homogeneous student body in a town where civic life still runs through face-to-face gatherings and where housing costs reflect the desirability of the setting. Parents weighing this school would do well to visit, talk with teachers and the principal, and ask directly about reading and math outcomes, class structure across the small grade-level cohorts, and how the transition to Middlebury schools works for Cornwall children.
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