Original Research by School Decision on Pacific Crest Innovation Academy
Pacific Crest Innovation Academy is a small regular public school serving grades eight through twelve in the Mill A School District, located in the unincorporated community of Cook, Washington. Cook is a tiny, rural residential area in the Columbia River Gorge, consisting of only a few private homes on a steep hillside. There is no commercial center, no sidewalks, and no civic infrastructure in Cook itself. Families in the area look to nearby communities like Carson or Stevenson, or across the river to Hood River, Oregon, for services and amenities. The surrounding landscape is dominated by the Columbia River and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
With an enrollment of about two dozen students across a high school and one middle school grade, Pacific Crest Innovation Academy is a very small school by any measure. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is predominantly white, with a small number of Hispanic students and students of two or more races. The school does not have a charter or magnet designation.
Important context: state testing data for the most recent school year is suppressed for all subjects at the tested grade level. This suppression is standard practice when the number of students tested in a group is very small, which is the case here given the school's overall size and the tiny number of eighth graders enrolled. Because the school's tested cohort is so small, the state withholds results to protect student privacy. A parent considering this school should be aware that there are no publicly reported proficiency rates in math, English language arts, or science from which to draw conclusions about academic performance. In a school this small, a single year's test results for a handful of students would say little about the program's quality anyway.
The school serves grades eight through twelve, but it is important to note that no twelfth graders were enrolled in the reported period. That may reflect the school's size and the natural ebb and flow of a very small student population. A graduation rate was not available, likely because the school's graduating class was too small to report or the school had no graduates in the measured window.
The Mill A School District, which oversees this school, does not appear to have undergone any significant parent-relevant changes in recent years based on publicly available information, and the district brief was largely empty of recent developments.
What this school offers is a very small, rural secondary setting in a quiet corner of Skamania County. For a family seeking a low student-to-staff ratio and a school community where every student is known personally, this environment could be a fit. For a family looking for evidence of academic performance, program offerings such as Advanced Placement or career and technical education pathways, or data on student discipline and support services, this school's thin public record provides very little. The school's tiny size means that many of the metrics parents typically rely on to compare schools are either suppressed or simply absent. A parent would want to reach out to the school directly to understand its course offerings, the range of extracurricular opportunities, and how the school prepares its students for life after graduation, particularly given the absence of a reported graduation rate and the limited grade-level data.
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