Park Avenue Elementary School

Park Avenue Elementary School in Stuttgart, AR, serves 641 students from Pre-Kindergarten through 4th grade and is part of the Stuttgart School District, which has a 2-star rating. The school faces significant challenges, with 100% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, indicating extremely high economic need. Over the past decade, Park Avenue's state ranking has dropped from the 45th percentile to the 8th percentile, reflecting a persistent decline in academic performance that now places it well below state averages in all subjects.

Compared to nearby schools, Park Avenue's academic outcomes are notably lower. For example, in the 2025-2026 school year, only 21.6% of students were proficient in mathematics and 17.4% in English Language Arts, while Dewitt Elementary School achieved 37.5% and 33.0% proficiency, respectively. This gap is striking because both schools have similar per-student spending (around $11,500), but Dewitt serves a population with a much lower free/reduced lunch rate (62%). Meanwhile, Clarendon Elementary School, which also has 100% economic disadvantage, spends over $17,600 per student and has a smaller student-teacher ratio of 11:1, yet its test scores are comparable to Park Avenue's. This suggests that simply adding resources may not be enough to overcome the challenges associated with high poverty.

Park Avenue also has the largest class sizes among these schools, with a student-teacher ratio of 17.8:1, compared to 15.3:1 at Dewitt and 11.0:1 at Clarendon. Despite these difficulties, there is a relative strength in science, where 27.3% of students were proficient, and 4th graders outperformed 3rd graders. However, the overall trend is concerning: the school has not seen improvement in its state ranking since 2016-2017, and its performance remains far below district and state averages. For parents, this data highlights that Park Avenue is a school in need of intensive, targeted support to address the impacts of poverty and improve academic outcomes.