Summary:
Chatom, Alabama is home to a single elementary school, Chatom Elementary School, which serves grades PK through 4 and is part of the Washington County district.
For parents, the standout feature of Chatom Elementary School is its exceptional English Language Arts performance. In the most recent school year, 90.2% of 3rd graders and 76.1% of 4th graders were proficient in English, outpacing the state average by more than 25 and 16 percentage points, respectively. The school also showed a dramatic improvement in mathematics, with 3rd grade math proficiency jumping from 25% to 56.9% in a single year, and 4th grade math reaching 56.5%—both well above state averages. This makes the school a clear academic leader within its district, significantly outperforming the Washington County average in nearly every subject. The one area of relative weakness is 4th grade science, where the school's 50% proficiency rate sits right at the state average.
However, there are important challenges to consider. The school reports a chronic absenteeism rate of 28.9%, which is more than double the state average of 12.0%. Despite this, the school still achieves strong results, suggesting effective classroom instruction. With about half of the students receiving free or reduced lunch, the school serves a moderate-poverty population yet still manages to exceed state benchmarks in core subjects. The school's state ranking has been volatile, swinging from 137th to 265th and back to 143rd over three years, even though test scores have remained consistently high in English. This suggests the ranking changes may reflect broader shifts in other schools' performance rather than a decline at Chatom. Overall, Chatom Elementary School is a high-performing school in literacy and math, with a notable attendance issue that does not appear to be holding students back academically.
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