Rivesville Elementary/middle School, Rivesville WV

Original Research by School Decision on Rivesville Elementary/middle School

Rivesville Elementary/Middle School sits in a small former coal town on the northwest bank of the Monongahela River, roughly a short drive north of Fairmont. The town grew up around coal mining and the Rivesville Power Plant, which has since closed, and today it functions as a quiet riverside community along US-19. Publicly reported sources describe a compact place where civic and commercial life clusters along the highway corridor near the river, with a handful of small businesses including a brewery, a record shop, and a market. Pricketts Fort State Park sits just downstream. The town has been losing population in recent years, and no major new housing developments or growth initiatives surfaced in available sources. For a parent, this is a small Appalachian river town with a modest residential base and limited local employment, relying on nearby Fairmont for broader amenities.

The school serves pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and is part of Marion County Schools. Its enrollment is modest for a school spanning that many grades. The student body is overwhelmingly white, with a small fraction of students identifying as two or more races and a handful of Black students. Free-or-reduced-price lunch data was not available, so the economic profile of the student body cannot be characterized from what was provided. IEP and English-learner data were also missing. Because the school does not serve high school grades, there is no graduation rate to report; that gap reflects the grade band, not a missing result.

On state assessments, the picture is mixed and varies considerably by grade and subject. English language arts is the relative bright spot. Proficiency in the middle grades, particularly sixth and seventh, reaches or exceeds the halfway mark, and third and eighth grade land close behind. Fourth grade is the weakest ELA result. Reading performance across the school is best described as middling, with some grades doing reasonably well and others trailing.

Mathematics is more uneven. Third grade stands out as a strong result, but proficiency drops sharply in fourth grade and again in eighth grade, where only about a quarter of tested students reached proficiency. Fifth, sixth, and seventh grade fall in a middle range. The pattern suggests that students enter the school performing reasonably well in early grades but that math results erode as they move up, with the weakest outcomes concentrated in the upper elementary and middle grades.

Science results are the softest area. Both tested grades, fifth and eighth, show low proficiency, and a parent may want to look into this further with the school to understand how science instruction is sequenced across the grade bands.

No multi-year trend data was available beyond the current year, so it is not possible to say whether these results are improving, declining, or stable over time. Average scale scores were also missing across all grades and subjects. Participation rates were high, with nearly all students tested in most grades.

The housing market around Rivesville is very affordable compared with both state and national benchmarks. Typical home values sit well below the state midpoint and far below the national figure, and estimated monthly mortgage costs are modest. No rental data was available for the immediate area. For families looking to buy, this is one of the more accessible price points in the region, though the tradeoff is a community with a shrinking population and limited local economic activity.

We looked for Marion County Schools' strategic priorities, curriculum changes, or other district-level developments of parent interest, but the search did not surface any, so there is little to report on that front. Program offerings, course access, discipline data, staffing levels, and attendance figures for the school itself were also not provided, leaving a gap in understanding the full school environment. What the data does show is a small, homogenous community school with uneven academic results, stronger in reading than in math, and weakest in science, set in an affordable but economically quiet riverside town.

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Academic performance

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

Math

Grade 358%

School 58% · District 54% · ▲ 4 pts above district

▲ 6 pts above state median · ▲ 9 pts above county median

Grade 429%

School 29% · District 54% · ▼ 25 pts below district

▼ 21 pts below state median · ▼ 25 pts below county median

Grade 546%

School 46% · District 40% · ▲ 6 pts above district

▲ 5 pts above state median

Grade 637%

School 37% · District 39% · ▼ 2 pts below district

▲ 6 pts above state median

Grade 743%

School 43% · District 45% · ▼ 2 pts below district

▲ 11 pts above state median

Grade 826%

School 26% · District 41% · ▼ 15 pts below district

▼ 3 pts below state median

English language arts

Grade 348%

School 48% · District 49%

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

Grade 436%

School 36% · District 56% · ▼ 20 pts below district

▼ 15 pts below state median · ▼ 17 pts below county median

Grade 542%

School 42% · District 44% · ▼ 2 pts below district

▼ 6 pts below state median

Grade 650%

School 50% · District 54% · ▼ 4 pts below district

▲ 5 pts above state median

Grade 754%

School 54% · District 51% · ▲ 3 pts above district

▲ 11 pts above state median

Grade 844%

School 44% · District 47% · ▼ 3 pts below district

▲ 3 pts above state median

Science

Grade 519%

School 19% · District 30% · ▼ 11 pts below district

▼ 12 pts below state median

Grade 826%

School 26% · District 26%

even with state median

This schoolMARION COUNTY SCHOOLS, 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.