The top reported proficiency rate is 62% in Math. The lowest is 56% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on St. Marys Elementary School
St. Marys Elementary School sits on Washington Street in Saint Marys, a small town in Pleasants County, West Virginia. It is a regular public school serving pre-kindergarten through fourth grade, part of the Pleasants County Schools district. The school draws from a community where housing is modestly priced by national standards. Typical home values in the area sit well below the national figure and somewhat below the West Virginia state benchmark, which means families looking to buy near the school face a relatively accessible market compared with most of the country.
The school is small, with a total enrollment that reflects its early-grade focus. Grade levels from pre-kindergarten through second grade each carry sizable cohorts, while the fourth grade is the smallest. The student body is nearly entirely white, with a very small number of Hispanic students and a handful identifying as two or more races. The school does not report free or reduced-price lunch data, special education counts, or English learner figures in the data we received, so we cannot characterize the economic profile of the student population or the share of students receiving specialized services. A parent evaluating fit on those dimensions would want to ask the school directly.
On the West Virginia General Summative Assessment, the school has results for third and fourth grade, the two tested grades it serves. Math proficiency is solid in both: a majority of third graders and a larger majority of fourth graders scored at or above the proficient level. English language arts follows a similar pattern, with a slim majority of third graders and a somewhat larger majority of fourth graders proficient. Both grades showed full participation, meaning every enrolled student in those grades sat for the assessment. The fourth-grade results are the stronger of the two across both subjects, which suggests students are building momentum as they move through the early grades here.
No state testing results appear for grades five through eight or for science at any grade. That is expected given the school's grade band. St. Marys Elementary stops at fourth grade, and West Virginia tests science in grades five and eight, which this school does not serve. The same applies to the upper-grade math and ELA assessments. A reader should not interpret those gaps as missing or weak performance; they simply reflect that the school's students move on to another building before those testing years arrive.
Because this is an elementary school, there is no graduation rate to report, no AP or dual-credit course access to describe, and no career pathway programming to assess. Those features belong to the secondary schools that these students will eventually attend in Pleasants County Schools. The district brief we reviewed turned up no recently reported parent-relevant changes, such as facility closures, boundary shifts, or program restructurings, so there is nothing concrete to flag on that front. We looked for the district's strategic priorities but found little, so we left it out rather than guess.
Several data fields that would help round out the picture are absent. There is no locale classification to describe the setting in standard terms, no discipline data, no staffing figures, no attendance rates, and no Title I status reported. Without those, we cannot speak to class sizes, teacher experience, or whether the school receives federal Title I support for low-income students. We also have no neighbor comparison fact-set to position St. Marys Elementary against other schools in the county, so the academic results stand on their own without a local benchmark.
What the available data does show is a small early-grades school where tested students are performing at a respectable level in both math and reading, with fourth graders outpacing third graders in both subjects. The community around it is one of the more affordable housing markets a family will find, with home prices running below the state and well below the national level. For a parent looking at pre-kindergarten through fourth grade in the Saint Marys area, the school offers a compact, early-focused setting with participation and proficiency numbers that hold up. The gaps in economic and support-program data are worth a direct conversation with the school before drawing conclusions about how it serves students who need additional resources.
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