The top reported proficiency rate is 73% in English language arts. The lowest is 61% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Craftsbury Schools
Craftsbury Schools is a pre-K through grade 12 public school sitting on the village green of Craftsbury Common, in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. It is among the oldest and smallest public schools in the state, and it carries the character of its setting. The village is agricultural and rural, with family-run farms, orchards, and farmstands scattered across five small villages within the town. Sterling College, a work college focused on environmental thinking, sits on the same Common. The Craftsbury Outdoor Center, with its Nordic trail network and sculling facilities, is a major recreational and economic anchor. Civic life centers on the green itself, with a seasonal Saturday farmers' market, Sunday concerts, and community events like Old Home Day. Growth here is slow and steady. The town is primarily residential and agricultural, with no major new housing developments identified in publicly reported sources. Walkability is limited to the immediate village center, with rural roads and rolling hills beyond.
The school serves roughly two hundred students across all grade levels, which makes it a genuinely small K-12 community. Classes at each grade are small, and the student body is predominantly white, with a small number of students identifying as Hispanic or of two or more races. About half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The data did not include IEP or English-learner counts, so those subgroup pictures are incomplete here.
On state assessments, the reported results are mixed and uneven across grades, partly because several grade-level results were suppressed, likely reflecting the very small number of tested students in each cohort. In English language arts, the grades with reported data showed a majority of students reaching proficiency, with third grade particularly strong. In math, the reported grades were more varied, with sixth grade standing out as a clear strength and the lower elementary grades landing closer to the middle. Science results were suppressed across the board. No multi-year trend data was available, so it is hard to say whether these results represent a stable pattern or year-to-year fluctuation. A parent looking for a fuller academic picture may want to ask the school directly about assessment trends and how it supports students in the grades where results were not reported.
The comparison data for Craftsbury relative to other districts in Orleans County was limited. Proficiency indexing was not computed for this cohort, and graduation rate and chronic absenteeism comparisons were not available because the school's values for those measures were missing from the data. The absence of a graduation rate is worth noting. Since the school does serve high school grades, a parent would reasonably want to ask about graduation outcomes, post-secondary pathways, and what the high school program looks like for a student progressing through the upper grades here.
No program offerings, course access, staffing, discipline, or attendance data was provided, so the narrative cannot speak to Advanced Placement options, dual-credit pathways, career and technical education, or extracurricular breadth. These are gaps a family would want to fill in conversation with the school. No civil-rights data was available either.
On the housing side, home values in the Craftsbury Common zip code sit modestly below both the Vermont state benchmark and the national benchmark, and the price-to-income ratio is under four, which suggests relative affordability for the region. Rental data was not available. Mortgage rates used in the affordability calculation reflect the current national environment, which remains elevated compared to recent years.
What the data does convey is a school deeply embedded in its community. The campus is not separated from civic life; it fronts the Common, alongside the church and the bandstand. For a family drawn to a rural, agricultural Vermont town where the school is a focal point of community identity, Craftsbury Schools offers that setting. The academic evidence is partial, and the small size means some years and subjects will always be hard to evaluate from state data alone. The right next step for an interested parent is to talk with the school about what the upper-grade experience looks like, how the small cohort functions socially and academically, and what supports are in place across the grade bands.
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