Original Research by School Decision on Moran Elementary
Moran Elementary sits in one of the most unusual settings of any public school in Wyoming. It is a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school in Moran, a tiny unincorporated community inside Grand Teton National Park, roughly thirty miles north of Jackson. The school serves as a local anchor for families living in and around the park gateway, and it is part of Teton County School District #1. After fifth grade, students continue to Jackson Hole Middle School and then Jackson Hole High School, both located in Jackson, which means families here commit to a long commute for secondary education.
The enrollment is among the smallest you will find at any public elementary school. Each grade level has only a handful of children, and the current fifth-grade class has no enrolled students. The student body is nearly entirely white, with one child identified as two or more races. Free-or-reduced-price lunch data was not reported, so the economic profile of the families here cannot be read from the available numbers. Information on English learners and special-education enrollment was also missing.
State testing was administered through Wyoming's WY-TOPP assessment in math, English language arts, and science for the tested elementary grades. The state did not publish proficiency rates for Moran Elementary in any subject or grade. This is a direct consequence of the school's size: with so few students in each tested grade, results are suppressed to protect individual student privacy. A parent reading the missing proficiency rates should understand that the absence reflects the tiny tested population, not a failure to test or a hidden weakness. Average scale scores, participation rates, and proficiency counts were also not reported for the same reason. No multi-year trend data was available. This means there is no quantitative academic record to characterize. A parent wanting to understand how children at Moran Elementary perform academically would need to talk directly with the school and district, since the published data simply cannot carry that read.
Because the school ends at fifth grade, there is no graduation rate, and the comparison set used for this profile, which places the entity relative to districts in Teton County, could not compute a proficiency index, graduation measure, or chronic absenteeism rate for Moran Elementary. Those metrics either do not apply to an elementary school or lack a reportable value.
Moran itself is a highway-junction community with no traditional downtown, no commercial street life, and no public transit. The built environment clusters near the Moran Entrance Station for Grand Teton National Park. The National Park Service and the Grand Teton Lodge Company are the dominant employers. Most other working residents commute south to Jackson. The community is not growing. It was historically larger but contracted and relocated in the mid-twentieth century when the lodge company purchased much of the town and moved structures to Jackson Lake Lodge. No new housing development is documented, and the setting within a national park constrains growth.
Housing in the 83013 zip code is extraordinarily expensive relative to national norms. The typical home value sits far above both the Wyoming and national benchmarks, and the price-to-income ratio is among the most extreme in the country. Rent data was not available for this zip code. A family considering Moran would need to reckon with a housing market that is essentially the Jackson Hole market extended northward, with very limited supply.
The parent district, Teton County School District #1, recently passed a housing bond in the November 2024 election to build workforce housing for district employees on district-owned land. The district has lost a substantial portion of its workforce in recent years due to the housing crisis in Jackson Hole, and this initiative is aimed at stabilizing teacher retention. For a family at Moran Elementary, that retention question matters in a direct way: classroom continuity in a school this small depends heavily on holding onto a small number of teachers.
What Moran Elementary offers is a public school experience at an intimate scale, in a remarkable natural setting, within a community that is quiet and remote. What it cannot offer, based on the available data, is a published academic track record. The school is so small that the state cannot report test results without compromising student privacy, and no other performance metrics were available. A family drawn to life inside Grand Teton National Park and willing to handle the commute to Jackson for middle and high school should talk with the school directly about instruction, staffing, and how a class of this size functions day to day.
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