The top reported proficiency rate is 25% in English language arts. The lowest is 19% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Clear Fork District Elementary
Clear Fork District Elementary sits along Clear Fork Road in Artie, a tiny unincorporated community in Raleigh County, West Virginia. The school serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school within Raleigh County Schools. It is a very small school by any standard, with only a handful of students per grade level. The student body is almost entirely white, with a single Hispanic student and one student identified as two or more races in the current enrollment. No free-or-reduced-price lunch data, special education counts, or English learner figures were available, so the economic and support-services picture for the student population is something a parent would need to ask the school about directly.
Artie itself is a rural hamlet in Appalachian hill country, strung along County Route 1 where it crosses the Clear Fork, a headwaters branch of the Big Coal River. There is no commercial district, no downtown grid, and no sidewalk infrastructure. The built environment is scattered homes along a two-lane valley road, with the White Oak Log Church and a former post office turned sports museum as the main landmarks. The nearest metropolitan center is Beckley, roughly eleven miles south, where most families would travel for shopping, healthcare, and employment. The community shows no signs of growth or new development; its post office closed years ago, and no new housing or commercial projects have surfaced. For a parent, this means a quiet, deeply rural setting where the school functions as one of the few civic anchors in the immediate area.
Academic results are limited by the school's small size. On the West Virginia General Summative Assessment for the most recent year, only third grade results were reportable. In math, a small fraction of third graders reached proficiency, and in English language arts, roughly a quarter did. Fourth and fifth grade proficiency rates were suppressed because the tested groups were too small to report without risking student identification. Participation was full among the students who were tested. Grades six through eight carry no results, which is expected since Clear Fork District Elementary does not serve those grades. No trend data is available because only a single year of results exists in the dataset. Average scale scores were not reported for any grade. Taken together, the available results suggest that third grade proficiency at Clear Fork is low relative to state expectations, but the numbers rest on very few students, so a single child's performance moves the rate considerably. A parent trying to gauge academic strength would be wise to ask the school how it supports early literacy and numeracy and what classroom-level evidence it can share beyond the state test.
Because this is an elementary school, there is no graduation rate, no AP or career pathway data, and no dual-credit information to report. No course access, staffing, attendance, or discipline data was provided. No programs or extracurricular offerings were listed in the data. Housing values and rental figures for the immediate area were not available, though the community's economic profile is clearly modest, with a very small labor force and no identified local employers beyond what families reach in Beckley.
The district context adds little additional detail. Raleigh County Schools had no publicly reported parent-relevant changes, strategic initiatives, curriculum shifts, or facility plans surfaced in the available research, so there is nothing to relay on that front.
What a family gets at Clear Fork District Elementary is a very small, rural elementary school serving a close-knit hollow community along the Big Coal River watershed. The peer group is tight and homogenous. The academic data is thin and, where it exists, points to proficiency levels that sit below where most families would want them. The setting offers quiet and community familiarity, with the trade-off of limited nearby amenities and a dependence on Beckley for most services. A parent considering this school should visit, ask about early-grade interventions and how teachers stretch resources across such small classes, and weigh whether the intimacy of a school this small fits their child or whether a larger Raleigh County elementary might offer more programmatic breadth.
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