Summary:
Firth District is home to one elementary school, A W Johnson Elementary School, which serves grades PK–4 with 256 students in the rural Firth District, a district ranked 23rd out of 101 in Idaho with a 4-star rating. Since this is the district's only elementary school, there are no nearby peer schools for comparison, so the focus here is on how the school performs relative to district and state benchmarks.
The most encouraging news for parents is the school's dramatic recent improvement. In 2025–2026, A W Johnson achieved 52.6% proficiency in math and 60.8% in ELA, comfortably exceeding state averages of 43.1% and 54.0%. That marks a huge leap from the prior year, when math proficiency sat at 45.5% and ELA at 45.9%. The school also keeps students engaged: its chronic absenteeism rate is just 4.0%, far better than the state's 13.8%. One area to watch is the grade-level pattern—third graders outperform fourth graders in both subjects, especially math (57.5% vs. 49.1%)—which may signal a need for extra support as students move up.
What makes these results especially notable is that nearly half of the student body (49.22%) qualifies for free/reduced lunch, yet the school still beats state averages in both tested subjects. Historically, A W Johnson has undergone a remarkable turnaround: it ranked at the 25th percentile with a 1-star rating in 2017–2018, climbed to the 33rd percentile with 2 stars in 2024–2025, and now sits at the 69th percentile with 3 stars in 2025–2026. The only caveat is that the most recent per-student spending figure ($5,642) comes from 2018–2019, so current funding levels are unknown—but the school appears to be delivering strong results regardless.
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