Harwood Elementary School

Harwood Elementary School serves 423 students in grades PK through 5 in Rigby, ID, and is part of the Jefferson County Joint District. Harwood currently holds a 1-star rating and ranks at the 26th percentile of Idaho elementary schools, a position it has maintained for roughly a decade. The school's main academic challenge is reading: only 40.7% of students are proficient in English Language Arts, which is significantly below the district rate of 58.6% and the state rate of 54.0%. In fact, Harwood's ELA scores are lower than every comparable school in the surrounding area, including Cottonwood Elementary (60.2%) and South Fork Elementary School (42.1%). This literacy gap also appears to impact other subjects; science proficiency is just 31.3% and chronic absenteeism is 18.7%, both considerably worse than district and state averages.

There is some encouraging news in the data. Harwood's math proficiency is 46.3%, which is actually slightly above the state average of 43.1% and higher than its own reading scores. This is an unusual pattern, as most schools in Idaho score higher in reading than math. Chronic absenteeism has also improved significantly over the past few years, dropping from a high of 26.3% to the current rate of 18.7%. Most notably, Hispanic students at Harwood ranked at the 83rd percentile statewide in 2023-2024, a 4-star performance that stands in stark contrast to the school's overall rating. This suggests that certain instructional approaches or supports already in place are working well for a specific group of students, which could offer a blueprint for broader improvement.

Comparing Harwood to other local schools shows that poverty and funding alone do not explain the performance gap. While Harwood has a higher free/reduced lunch rate than many of its district neighbors, schools like Fairview Elementary achieve much stronger scores with similar demographics, and even Ucon Elementary School, with a higher poverty rate, outperforms Harwood in ELA. Harwood also spends more per student than any other school in its district. This points to the need for targeted, evidence-based strategies rather than simply more funding or smaller classes. The path forward appears to rest on intensifying literacy instruction, continuing to reduce absenteeism, and leveraging the successful practices already helping Hispanic students succeed.