Best Public Schools in Nome, AK

All four public schools serving Nome, Alaska—part of the Nome Public Schools district—educate roughly 672 students across elementary, middle, and high school grades in a remote, high-poverty community where more than 99% of students at most schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

The clearest standout is Anvil City Science Academy, a small grades 5–8 middle school of 60 students that outperforms every other local school and even beats Alaska state averages in English, math, and science. Its math proficiency rate is 43.33%, compared with just 18.16% districtwide, and it does this while serving a 100% low-income student body. By contrast, Nome-Beltz Middle/High is the district's biggest concern: it ranks near the bottom of Alaska high schools, with only 4.08% of students proficient in math and 10.20% in English. What makes the gap especially striking is that Anvil and Nome-Beltz share the same physical address, yet 6th graders at Anvil score far higher in both reading and math than 6th graders at Nome-Beltz. Meanwhile, Nome Elementary sits in the middle: its science and math scores are better than the district average but still below state levels, and performance tends to drop as students approach 5th grade. Extensions Correspondence, an alternative K–12 school with only 32 students, has very limited data and a 50% graduation rate, so families should interpret its single reported score cautiously.

For parents, the biggest takeaway is that high poverty does not doom a school to low results, as Anvil proves. Higher spending also does not guarantee success—Nome-Beltz spends the most per student at $20,511 yet posts the lowest scores, while Anvil achieves more on $14,472 per student. Promisingly, Nome-Beltz graduates 80.9% of students despite its low test scores, which is higher than the district-wide graduation rate of 76.0%. Still, with large one-year drops in math at Nome Elementary and science at Nome-Beltz, district leaders should look closely at what makes Anvil work and how those strategies might transfer to other schools in Nome.