Summary:
The Mineral Springs School District is home to a single high school, Mineral Springs High School, which serves grades 7 through 12 with a small enrollment of 197 students in a rural Arkansas area where over 82% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
As the only high school in the district, Mineral Springs High School presents a striking paradox: it spends a very high $22,293 per student and boasts an exceptionally low student-teacher ratio of 5.3 to 1, yet academic outcomes are significantly below state averages. The school is ranked in the 9th percentile statewide (266 out of 293 schools) with a 0-star rating. Proficiency rates in core subjects are roughly half or less of the state average—for example, only 17.5% of students are proficient in English Language Arts compared to the state's 39.4%, and just 21.6% are proficient in Mathematics versus the state's 44.1%. The graduation rate of 85.2% also trails the state average of 90.1%, though the dropout rate is a low 0.5%.
The most critical red flag is in mathematics, particularly Algebra, where only 2.8% of students are proficient (compared to 36.9% statewide), and in the previous year, 0% were proficient in both Algebra and Geometry. Performance also varies widely by grade, with 7th graders achieving 28% proficiency in ELA while 10th graders reached only 4.5%. A small bright spot is 10th-grade Biology, where 18.2% of students are proficient, the only high school subject exceeding half the state average. These findings suggest that despite strong financial resources and small class sizes, deep-seated challenges—likely tied to high poverty levels—require targeted instructional and curricular interventions to improve student success.
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