Summary:
The Forrest City School District in Arkansas is served by a single high school, Forrest City High School, which educates 563 students in grades 9 through 12 and faces significant academic challenges despite notable resource investments.
Forrest City High School consistently ranks in the bottom 13% of Arkansas high schools, currently placing 254th out of 293 schools statewide. The school serves a student population where 100% qualify for free or reduced lunch, indicating widespread economic disadvantage. Despite this, the school maintains a very low student-to-teacher ratio of 6.9:1 and spends $14,732 per student—a relatively high level of investment that creates a stark contrast between resources and academic outcomes. The graduation rate stands at 80.5%, nearly 10 percentage points below the state average of 90.1%, while the dropout rate is 3.7%.
The most critical area of concern is mathematics, with only 6.5% of students proficient in Algebra and 7.2% in Geometry—performance gaps of over 30 percentage points compared to state averages. English Language Arts and Reading proficiency rates are 23.9% and 25.6% respectively, though these have shown notable improvement from the previous year (up from 15.3% and 17.1%). A bright spot appears in 9th-grade Biology, where 68.2% of students are proficient, close to the state average of 72.2%, though this drops sharply to 15.5% for 10th graders. This suggests that while the school faces deep-rooted challenges, targeted interventions in literacy may be gaining traction, and the strong 9th-grade science performance warrants further investigation to replicate that success across other subjects.
Thank you for your feedback!