Summary:
Hanover School District No. 28 is a small, rural Colorado district ranked 76th out of 115 districts (34th percentile) with a 2-star rating, serving 264 students across two schools: Hanover Junior-Senior High School (grades 6–12, 134 students) and Prairie Heights Elementary School (grades PK–5, 130 students). Both schools serve a high-poverty population, with 64.2% and 68.5% of students respectively qualifying for free/reduced lunch. The district as a whole sits in the lower half of Colorado school systems, and neither school posts standout state-test performance.
Academically, Prairie Heights Elementary outperforms the high school on state assessments, with 25.0% of students proficient in CMAS ELA and 12.5% in math, compared to 22.9% ELA and 8.8% math at Hanover Junior-Senior High School in 2024–2025. However, the high school has a genuine bright spot: a 90.9% graduation rate, well above the state's 85.6%, and a dropout rate of just 1.3%. High school students also perform far closer to state averages on PSAT assessments — 57% proficient in Reading/Writing versus 65% statewide — than they do on CMAS tests. The single biggest concern across both schools is chronic absenteeism: 46.9% at the high school and 42.8% at the elementary school, both far above the state's 28.4%.
Prairie Heights has declined over time, dropping from the 49th percentile in 2016–2017 to the 33rd percentile in 2024–2025, despite maintaining a better raw proficiency rate than the high school. Both schools enjoy favorable student–teacher ratios (11.8 at the high school, 15.6 at the elementary), yet this does not translate into strong scores, suggesting poverty, absenteeism, and limited support services outweigh class size advantages. With only about 130 students per school, year-to-year data fluctuates significantly, so multi-year trends matter more than any single year. The most urgent priority for the district is clearly improving attendance, which would likely have a ripple effect on academic achievement across both schools.
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