Summary:
The Pea Ridge School District is home to a single high school, Pea Ridge High School, which serves grades 10 through 12 with 597 students in a relatively affluent area where only 27.97% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Pea Ridge High School presents a mixed picture for parents. On the positive side, the school boasts an excellent graduation rate of 94.7% and a very low dropout rate of 0.8%, both significantly better than state averages. However, these strong outcomes clash with alarmingly low academic proficiency rates. The most critical red flag is a "Geometry crisis": only 11.7% of students are proficient in Geometry, which is less than half the state average of 26.4% and a fraction of the district's own average of 40.2%. This suggests a systemic problem with how the subject is taught at this specific school. Performance is also inconsistent across other subjects—Reading proficiency (41.3%) slightly exceeds the state average, while Biology (33.6%) falls well below it.
The school's state ranking has been a rollercoaster, jumping from the 43rd percentile in 2023-2024 to the 75th percentile in 2024-2025, then dropping back to the 53rd percentile in 2025-2026. This volatility, combined with the fact that the school serves a relatively wealthy population and spends $13,869 per student (above the state average), suggests that resources are not translating into stable, high academic outcomes. Parents should be particularly concerned about the Geometry deficiency and the gap between high graduation rates and low test scores, which raises questions about academic standards. The school's strengths in Reading and its strong graduation metrics are positives, but the math and science weaknesses demand immediate attention.
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