The top reported proficiency rate is 38% in Science. The lowest is 9% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Shoreham Elementary School
Shoreham Elementary School sits in a small, rural agricultural town on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain in Addison County. The town's roots run deep in farming, dating to the 1760s, and agriculture remains a defining feature of the landscape. WhistlePig, a well-known whiskey distillery, operates here, and the village center clusters around the intersection of Route 22A and Route 74. Commercial activity is limited, and many residents likely commute to Middlebury, about twelve miles east, for services and employment. The nearest hospital is Porter Medical Center in Middlebury. The housing market in the Shoreham zip code sits slightly above the Vermont state benchmark, with a typical home value that reflects the broader pattern of rural Addison County rather than the pressures of a hot commuter market.
The school is small, serving pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, and its enrollment is modest for its grade band. The student body is entirely white, and a substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. There is no data on English learners or students with individualized education programs, so those dimensions of the school's population are not visible here. Because the school serves only elementary grades, there is no graduation rate to report, and the neighbor comparison for graduation and chronic absenteeism is not applicable at this level.
State assessment results from the most recent year tell a mixed and partial picture. Vermont's Comprehensive Assessment Program tests students in grades three through five in math and ELA, and grade five in science. For this school, third-grade results in both math and ELA were suppressed, likely reflecting small class sizes and privacy thresholds. Fifth-grade math and ELA were also suppressed. The fourth-grade results were reported: math proficiency was very low, with only a handful of students reaching proficiency, while ELA proficiency was moderate, with roughly a third of tested students meeting the bar. Fifth-grade science proficiency landed at a similar moderate level, with just under two-fifths of students demonstrating proficiency.
These numbers come from very small tested groups, which means a few students moving above or below the proficiency line can shift results dramatically from year to year. The low fourth-grade math result stands out and is worth a parent's attention. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, asking how instruction and intervention are structured and whether the small cohort size is distorting what looks like a sharp result. The ELA and science figures, while not strong, are more in line with what one might expect from a small rural school serving a population with elevated economic need.
The comparison fact-set, which positions this school relative to districts in Addison County, could not produce a proficiency index because the cohort was too small. That means there is no clean way to rank Shoreham against its neighbors on academic outcomes from this dataset alone.
What a family gets here is a very small, community-rooted elementary school in a quiet agricultural town. The setting is rural and close-knit, with Lake Champlain nearby and Middlebury providing regional amenities a short drive away. The school's academic data is thin and, where reported, uneven, with a particular soft spot in math. Families considering Shoreham Elementary would benefit from direct conversations with school staff about how they support core instruction, especially in mathematics, and how the small cohort structure shapes both the classroom experience and the testing results.
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