Summary:
Attalla City is home to one elementary school, Attalla Elementary School, which serves grades PK through 5 and enrolls 665 students in a community where 70% of families qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Attalla Elementary School is a school of striking contrasts. The most encouraging news for parents is that chronic absenteeism is remarkably low at just 4.0%—one-third the state average of 12.0%—which signals strong daily attendance and family engagement. Academically, the school’s best performance is in 5th grade English, where 70.41% of students are proficient, slightly edging out the state average of 69.53%. This represents a stunning 14.6-point jump from the prior year. However, math is a serious concern across all grades. Most alarming is 5th grade math, where only 15.31% of students are proficient compared to 39.06% statewide—a gap of nearly 24 points. Third grade math also collapsed this year, dropping from 54.26% to 28.89% proficiency, a 25-point decline that pushed the school from above to well below the state average. Science is also weak at 33.67% proficiency versus 50.23% statewide.
The school’s overall ranking has seesawed recently, improving to the 42nd percentile in 2024-2025 before falling back to the 34th percentile in 2025-2026, earning a consistent 2-star rating. This volatility suggests cohort differences or instructional shifts rather than a steady trend. The clear pattern is that English outperforms math at every grade level—in 5th grade, English proficiency is more than four times higher than math. With a student-teacher ratio of 17.9:1 and per-student spending of $9,033, the school has reasonable resources. The path forward is to replicate the success seen in 5th grade English and apply those strategies to math instruction, particularly in the upper grades where the "math cliff" is most severe.
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