Summary:
Zip code 36904 in Butler, Alabama, is served by a single high school, Choctaw County High School, a small rural institution within the Choctaw County district that enrolls 231 students across grades 7 through 12.
Because this is the only high school in the area, all comparisons are against state averages rather than local peers. The school faces significant academic challenges, particularly in mathematics, where proficiency is critically low across all grade levels—7th graders posted 0% proficiency and 11th graders just 6.06%, compared to state averages of 24-27%. English performance tells a more complex story: middle school students perform relatively close to state norms (48.65% in 7th grade and 41.18% in 8th grade), but 11th grade English proficiency collapses to just 6.45%, a dramatic 35-point drop that suggests a serious gap in high school-level instruction or a uniquely struggling cohort. Science proficiency in 8th grade (25.49%) is the school's strongest subject relative to state levels, though still roughly half the state average.
With only about 38 students per grade, year-to-year metrics swing widely, making it hard to distinguish systemic problems from class-specific variations. The school's graduation rate of 86% is only 5.5 points below the state average, despite very low test scores, which may indicate that students are progressing to graduation without meeting academic proficiency benchmarks. Chronic absenteeism runs at 15.2%, above the state's 12.0%, and the school's state ranking has fluctuated between the 5th and 21st percentiles over the past three years. With 76.62% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, this is a high-poverty school operating with a 17.1:1 student-teacher ratio and per-student spending of $10,983. The most urgent priority is addressing the steep decline in high school English and math performance, with targeted interventions at the 9th-11th grade transition likely to yield the greatest improvements.
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