Summary:
Zip code 71950 is home to a single high school, Kirby High School, which serves grades 7 through 12 in the rural community of Kirby, Arkansas, as part of the Kirby School District.
Kirby High School is a very small school with 176 students and an exceptionally low student-teacher ratio of 3.8, which allows for highly personalized instruction. The school boasts a strong graduation rate of 92.3% and a very low dropout rate of 0.5%. However, its academic performance presents a mixed picture. While overall Mathematics proficiency (45.9%) slightly exceeds the state average, this strength is driven entirely by 7th and 8th-grade students. Performance drops sharply in high school-level math, with only 23% of 9th graders proficient in Algebra and a concerning 0% proficiency in Geometry. The school also struggles in Biology, with a 25% proficiency rate compared to the state's 42.7%.
On a positive note, Kirby High School showed significant year-over-year improvement in core subjects from 2024-2025 to 2025-2026, with English Language Arts rising from 23.8% to 30.6% proficient, Reading from 26.8% to 31.5%, and Science from 18.0% to 32.8%. Despite these gains, the school's state ranking has been declining, dropping from the 30th percentile to the 19th percentile over the same period. The school's small size means that a single group of struggling students can heavily influence subject-level scores, but the recent improvements suggest that new instructional strategies may be taking hold. The primary challenge for the school is bridging the gap between middle and high school math and science to reverse its ranking trend.
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