Summary:
The Kirby School District is served by a single elementary school, Kirby Elementary School, a small, rural institution in Arkansas with 216 students in grades Pre-Kindergarten through 6th grade.
Kirby Elementary School presents a fascinating academic profile with clear strengths and challenges. The school's most impressive achievement is in Mathematics, where overall proficiency jumped dramatically from 34.7% to 51.3% between the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 school years, now significantly outpacing the state average of 44.1%. This "math miracle" is particularly noteworthy given that 77.78% of students are economically disadvantaged. The 3rd grade class also posted an exceptional Science proficiency rate of 62.1%, which is 16.7 percentage points above the state average. However, the school struggles in English Language Arts (ELA), where overall proficiency (38.2%) falls slightly below the state average (39.4%), with particularly wide gaps in 3rd and 5th grades. Interestingly, the school's Reading scores (40.5%) are on par with the state, suggesting that while overall literacy is a challenge, reading comprehension is a relative strength.
As a small school, Kirby Elementary experiences high performance volatility from year to year due to small class sizes. For example, the 5th grade class in 2025-2026 scored significantly below state averages in all subjects, while the 3rd grade class that same year was a powerhouse in Math and Science. The school maintains a very low student-teacher ratio of 11.1:1, which allows for individualized attention, and has earned a consistent 3-star rating over the last three years, ranking in the 52nd to 57th percentile statewide. With per-student spending of $12,552, the school demonstrates that targeted instructional strategies in STEM subjects can yield strong results even in a high-poverty setting.
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