Sheldon Elementary School, Sheldon VT

Original Research by School Decision on Sheldon Elementary School

Sheldon Elementary School sits on Poor Farm Road in the town of Sheldon, in Franklin County, Vermont. It is a public school serving prekindergarten through eighth grade, part of the Northern Mountain Valley Unified Union School District. The school is small for its grade band, with a steady enrollment spread across the early grades through middle school. Its student body is predominantly white, with a very small number of students from other racial or ethnic backgrounds. A slight majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which gives the school a working-class to lower-middle-class character rather than an affluent one. Data on individualized education plans and English learner status was not available, so those portions of the student support picture remain unclear from the provided information.

On Vermont's Comprehensive Assessment Program, the most recent results show a school with genuinely different profiles in English language arts versus mathematics. In ELA, proficiency rises meaningfully as students move through the upper elementary and middle grades. By seventh and eighth grade, roughly half of tested students reach proficiency, which is a reasonably strong showing for a small rural school. The lower elementary grades in ELA are more modest, with somewhere around a third to a quarter of students proficient, and fourth grade stands out as the weakest point in the sequence.

Mathematics tells a less encouraging story. Proficiency rates across grades three through eight bounce around but generally land below the middle of the range, with sixth grade particularly low and fourth and eighth grades also soft. Third and seventh grade are the relative bright spots, where about a third of students reach proficiency. The pattern suggests that math instruction may be less consistent across grade levels than the ELA program, or that cohorts are arriving with uneven preparation. A parent with a child progressing through the upper grades may want to look into this further with the school, particularly around the transition points where scores dip.

Science is assessed only in fifth and eighth grade in Vermont. Both grades show modest proficiency, with fifth grade lower than eighth. The eighth grade science result is the stronger of the two, which aligns with the broader pattern at this school of upper-grade performance outpacing the lower grades, especially in literacy-heavy subjects.

Because Sheldon Elementary ends at eighth grade, there is no graduation rate to report; that measure applies to high schools and does not exist for this entity. The same is true of high school specific metrics like AP or dual-credit access. No chronic absenteeism, discipline, or staffing data was provided, and no program offerings or extracurricular details were available in the data we received. We looked for the district's recent parent-relevant changes but found only directory and demographic information, so we left that out rather than guess.

Sheldon itself is a rural Franklin County community. Housing in the school's zip code sits below both the Vermont state benchmark and the national benchmark, with an estimated monthly mortgage that is manageable relative to a national median household income. The local market has seen modest recent appreciation, and the price-to-income ratio is on the lighter side, meaning a family buying at the typical local home value would carry a mortgage that is not unusually burdensome by current national standards. Mortgage rates in the broader economy remain elevated by recent historical standards, which affects affordability everywhere, but Sheldon's lower price point cushions that somewhat. No rental data was available for the immediate area.

Relative to districts in Franklin County, the comparison set available to us was too small to produce a meaningful proficiency index, and graduation and attendance comparisons were not applicable for a prekindergarten through eighth grade school. So there is no peer positioning to report here beyond the raw state assessment results.

What a family gets at Sheldon Elementary is a small, rural, prekindergarten through eighth grade school where the literacy program appears to build momentum through the upper grades, where math is more uneven, and where the community is modest in income and predominantly white. The housing market is more affordable than much of Vermont, which may matter for families considering a move into the attendance area. The gaps in the data, particularly around special populations, discipline, and staffing, mean a full picture would require a direct conversation with the school.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 338%

School 38% · district not reported

▲ 5 pts above state median

Grade 425%

School 25% · district not reported

▼ 4 pts below state median

Grade 533%

School 33% · district not reported

▼ 2 pts below state median · ▲ 9 pts above county median

Grade 617%

School 17% · district not reported

▼ 28 pts below state median · ▼ 16 pts below county median

Grade 733%

School 33% · district not reported

▼ 8 pts below state median

Grade 821%

School 21% · district not reported

▼ 12 pts below state median

English language arts

Grade 338%

School 38% · district not reported

▼ 8 pts below state median

Grade 422%

School 22% · district not reported

▼ 33 pts below state median

Grade 536%

School 36% · district not reported

▼ 12 pts below state median

Grade 638%

School 38% · district not reported

▼ 15 pts below state median · ▼ 11 pts below county median

Grade 747%

School 47% · district not reported

▼ 12 pts below state median

Grade 850%

School 50% · district not reported

▼ 9 pts below state median

Science

Grade 521%

School 21% · district not reported

▼ 23 pts below state median · ▼ 10 pts below county median

Grade 832%

School 32% · district not reported

▼ 7 pts below state median · ▼ 4 pts below county median

This schoolDistrict average, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.

Proficiency by household income

English language arts

Grade 3Lower-income9%Higher-income25%16 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income7%Higher-income35%29 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income64%Higher-income60%4 pp gap

Grade 6Lower-income50%Higher-income35%15 pp gap

Grade 7Lower-income44%Higher-income50%6 pp gap

Grade 8Lower-income43%Higher-income59%16 pp gap

Mathematics

Grade 3Lower-income18%Higher-income35%17 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income0%Higher-income18%18 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income36%Higher-income47%10 pp gap

Grade 6Lower-income21%Higher-income29%8 pp gap

Grade 7Lower-income38%Higher-income29%8 pp gap

Grade 8Lower-income14%Higher-income29%15 pp gap