Summary:
Zip code 83629 is served by one public high school, Horseshoe Bend Middle/Senior High, a small combined middle and high school serving grades 6 through 12 with an enrollment of 86 students in the Horseshoe Bend School District. Because this is the only high school in the area, all comparisons are made at the school, district, and state levels. The school has a notably low student-teacher ratio of 7.8, indicating small class sizes, but it also serves a student body where more than half qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Academic performance at Horseshoe Bend has been highly volatile. In the 2024–2025 school year, math proficiency was 45.5%, which was above both the district (44.4%) and state (43.1%) averages. The following year, math proficiency plummeted to 17.4%, far below the district’s 30.2% and the state’s 43.1%. ELA proficiency also dropped from 42.4% to 30.4% over the same period, with the state average staying around 54%. These swings likely reflect the very small cohort size—with only 86 students, a small number of individual performances can drastically change percentages. The graduation rate for 2024–2025 was 82.5%, matching the district and state rates exactly, suggesting an average completion rate for Idaho.
Chronic absenteeism is a concern, with 19.0% of students chronically absent compared to 16.5% for the district and 13.8% for the state. Per-student spending is relatively high at $11,547, likely due to the diseconomies of scale in such a small school. The school’s state ranking has also been inconsistent, dropping from the 54th percentile (3 stars) in 2021–2022 to the 38th percentile (2 stars) in 2020–2021, though the raw rank only moved from 51st to 55th as the number of ranked schools changed. For parents, this means the school offers small classes and individual attention, but it also faces significant challenges with poverty, absenteeism, and academic consistency that should be weighed carefully.
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