The top reported proficiency rate is 67% in English language arts. The lowest is 41% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Champlain School
Champlain School sits on Pine Street in Burlington's South End, serving pre-kindergarten through fifth grade as part of the Burlington School District. The most distinctive thing about this school is its pre-kindergarten footprint, which accounts for more than half of the total enrollment. This gives Champlain an unusually early-childhood character, with a large cohort of children arriving before kindergarten age alongside the more familiar elementary grades from kindergarten through five. A family whose priority is an early entry point into Burlington's public schools would find that here in a way few other district schools offer. About a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is majority white, with Black students forming the next largest group, followed by smaller Hispanic, multiracial, and Asian populations.
On Vermont's Comprehensive Assessment Program, Champlain's results tell a mixed but mostly encouraging story. In English language arts, the school performs well, with a majority of third graders proficient and proficiency climbing steadily through fourth and fifth grades, reaching a point where roughly three quarters of fifth graders meet or exceed the standard. That upward trajectory through the grade band is a genuine strength and suggests that the longer students are at Champlain, the stronger their literacy becomes. Science results in fifth grade are similarly solid, with a clear majority proficient. Math is more uneven. Third grade math proficiency is quite low, with only a small share of students reaching proficiency, and a parent may want to look into this further with the school. By fourth and fifth grade, math results improve to where about half the students are proficient, which is a better picture but still leaves room for growth. No participation rate data was reported, and no multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say whether these results represent improvement or decline from prior years. The school does not serve high school grades, so no graduation rate applies.
Champlain sits in Burlington, Vermont's largest city and a regional college town anchored by the University of Vermont and Champlain College. The surrounding neighborhood is part of the South End, an area known for its arts venues, including the South End Art Hop, and its proximity to downtown. Burlington's Church Street Marketplace pedestrian mall, the transformed waterfront on Lake Champlain, and a large year-round farmers' market define the city's civic and commercial life. The city has invested in bikeways and sustainability, having run entirely on renewable energy and set a net-zero energy goal. The University of Vermont Medical Center and the university itself are the largest employers in the state, alongside companies like Burton Snowboards, Dealer.com, and Lake Champlain Chocolates. The housing market in this zip code sits well above the state and national benchmarks, with typical home values in the upper-middle range for the region. Estimated monthly mortgage costs exceed typical rents, and rents themselves take up roughly a third of median household income. The market saw a slight year-over-year dip in home values while rents edged upward.
The Burlington School District has been in a period of active investment. Voters approved a bond for a new high school and technical center, on track to open in fall 2026. The district also renovated an airplane hangar at Burlington International Airport into an Aviation, Career, and Technical Education Center for Burlington Technical Center, housing automotive, design engineering, fabrication, and aviation programs, which opened for students in fall 2025. A renovation of the Integrated Arts Academy added kindergarten classrooms and a geothermal system. The district also implemented a Restorative Code of Conduct aimed at reducing suspensions and eliminating racial disparities in discipline, and publicly reported that it eliminated those disparities for the first time. These are district-level changes that shape the context Champlain families are part of, even though they mainly affect the secondary level.
The neighbor comparison set, drawn relative to districts in Chittenden County, did not yield applicable comparisons for proficiency, graduation, or attendance because the school-level cohort was too small and the relevant values were missing. No discipline, staffing, course access, or attendance data was available for Champlain itself. Individualized education program and English learner counts were also missing. These gaps mean a parent would need to ask the school directly about student support services, classroom ratios, and attendance patterns.
What the available data does show is an elementary school with a strong literacy and science program that gains momentum as students move through the grades, a math program that recovers from a weak third-grade showing but has not yet reached the same strength as English, and a distinctive early-childhood presence that makes it a primary entry point into Burlington's public school system for families with very young children.
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