The top reported proficiency rate is 62% in English language arts. The lowest is 56% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Clearmont K-12 School
Clearmont K-12 School is the single public school serving the tiny ranch community of Clearmont in southeastern Sheridan County, Wyoming. It sits within the Sheridan County School District #3, a district so small that this one building carries every grade from kindergarten through twelfth. The town itself is a compact farm and ranch settlement strung along the old Black and Yellow Road, with a library, a park, two churches, and a handful of small businesses constituting its entire civic center. Residents travel about 38 miles to Sheridan for hospital care and major shopping, and the surrounding economy runs on alfalfa hay production and livestock grazing. The Ucross Foundation art gallery, a regional cultural institution with an artists-in-residence program, sits on a working ranch roughly ten miles west. Clear Creek runs year-round through the valley.
The school's enrollment is very small, with only a handful of students per grade. This is the defining feature of the academic experience here. State assessment results from the most recent year show wide swings from grade to grade, which is what you would expect when each tested group contains only a few students. A single child moving from proficient to not proficient, or vice versa, can shift a grade's results dramatically. Fourth graders showed strong proficiency in both math and English language arts, and eighth graders landed in a high range in both subjects. Science results for those two tested grades were moderate. Fifth and sixth grade math, along with sixth grade English language arts, came in lower, and a few grades had too few tested students to report a proficiency rate at all. Against the comparison set of districts in Sheridan County, the school's overall proficiency sits below the midpoint. A parent reading these results should keep the tiny tested counts in mind. One year's numbers at a school this size are a snapshot of a few children, not a trend line. A parent may want to look into multi-year patterns directly with the school to get a fuller picture.
Graduation rate data was not available for this school, and chronic absenteeism figures were not reported either. Free and reduced-price lunch counts, special education rates, and English learner data were all missing from the available information, so the economic and support-service picture is incomplete from what we have. The student body is nearly entirely white, with a small number of Hispanic students and a small number identifying as two or more races. No civil-rights, discipline, course-access, or staffing data was provided, so we cannot speak to those areas.
The district operates on a four-day school week, as referenced on its official website. That schedule shapes family life in ways that matter: childcare for the off day, compressed instructional time, and a different weekly rhythm than a conventional five-day calendar. Families considering this school should weigh whether that structure fits their work and home situation.
Housing in the Clearmont zip code is expensive relative to both state and national benchmarks. Typical home values sit well above what you would find in much of Wyoming, and the price-to-income ratio is high, meaning a local family earning a typical income would find purchasing a home here a stretch. No rental data was available for this area, so the rental picture is a gap. For families coming from outside, buying into this community requires a substantial budget. The town has seen modest population growth in recent years, but no major new housing developments or commercial projects were identified in publicly reported sources. Growth here is slow and steady, not transformative.
What this school offers is intimacy. A child who attends Clearmont K-12 will spend their entire academic career in one building, in a town where people know each other, with class sizes small enough that every teacher knows every student. What it does not offer, based on the data available, is the breadth of programming, extracurriculars, or specialized services that a larger school can provide. No AP, career-technical, or dual-credit offerings were listed in the data, though absence in the data does not confirm absence in practice. A parent with a teenager should ask the school directly what upper-grade coursework and postsecondary options are available, because the provided data does not cover that ground. The four-day week, the rural isolation, and the small peer group are the trade-offs that come with living in a close-knit ranch community where a wave is expected and a handshake still means something.
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