Summary:
School District No. Re-4 Buffalo contains just one high school, Merino Junior Senior High School, a small rural school in Merino, Colorado serving 155 students in grades 7-12. The district itself is ranked 20th out of 115 Colorado districts, placing it in the 83rd percentile with a four-star rating. Merino stands out for strong underclassman test scores: 9th graders achieved 73% proficiency in PSAT reading/writing and 58% in math, compared to state averages of 66% and 40%. Tenth graders posted similarly strong results at 76% and 57% proficiency, versus state averages of 65% and 39%.
However, the school shows a dramatic drop in 11th-grade math performance. Only 15% of 11th graders were proficient in SAT math, less than half the state rate of 32%, while SAT reading/writing came in at 58% against the state's 60%. This 42-point gap between 10th-grade PSAT math and 11th-grade SAT math results points to a possible weakness in junior-year math curriculum or a specific struggling cohort. The school's graduation rate of 92.0% is well above the state's 85.6%, and the dropout rate of 0.6% (2022-2023) is dramatically below the state's 1.6%. Merino's own state ranking sits at 122 out of 338 schools, placing it in the 64th percentile with a three-star rating.
The most urgent concern is chronic absenteeism: 44.6% of Merino students were chronically absent, far exceeding both the district rate (28.1%) and state rate (28.4%). For a school of 155 students, that means roughly 69 students are chronically absent. This is especially troubling given the school's otherwise strong graduation and dropout numbers, and it may be connected to the poor 11th-grade SAT math scores. With a free/reduced lunch rate of 32.26% and a student-teacher ratio of 16.7, Merino serves a moderate-poverty population while outperforming the state in most lower-grade subjects. Targeting attendance and providing extra math support for juniors could meaningfully improve an otherwise solid school.
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