Choctaw County High School

Choctaw County High School in Butler, AL, is a small public school serving 231 students in grades 7 through 12, where over 76% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The school is part of the Choctaw County district, which ranks in the bottom 16th percentile of all Alabama districts.

Academically, Choctaw County High School faces significant challenges, particularly in high school core subjects. In the most recent school year, only 6.06% of 11th graders were proficient in math and just 6.45% were proficient in English—both dramatically below state averages of 27.21% and 33.73%, respectively. The school's overall state ranking has been volatile, swinging from the 5th percentile to the 21st percentile and back down to the 8th percentile over the past few years. This instability suggests that outcomes may be heavily influenced by individual cohorts of students. A particularly concerning trend is the school's performance with male students, where it ranked in the 5th percentile statewide—a sharp drop from the 29th percentile the previous year. The graduation rate of 86.0% also trails the state average of 91.5%.

What makes these results especially notable is the comparison to Southern Choctaw High School, the district's other high school. Despite nearly identical demographics (both have about 77% free/reduced lunch eligibility), Southern Choctaw ranked in the 33rd percentile statewide while Choctaw County ranked in the 8th. The gap is starkest in 11th-grade English (6.45% vs. 21.88% proficiency) and science (12.12% vs. 28.13%). However, there is a bright spot: 7th-grade English proficiency reached 48.65%, close to the state average of 55.25%. This suggests the school teaches English effectively in middle school but fails to sustain that progress by 11th grade. With chronic absenteeism at 15.2%—only slightly above the state average—students are attending school, yet outcomes remain poor, pointing to issues with instructional quality or academic rigor rather than attendance.