Palestine CUSD 3

Palestine CUSD 3 has two schools serving preschool through grade 12: Palestine Grade School (PK–8, 274 students) and Palestine High School (grades 9–12, 80 students). The biggest concern is the grade school’s 2025–26 all-grades results: IAR ELA proficiency was 31%, 26 points below the state, and math was 18%, 22 points below.

The strongest results are specific to particular grades and subjects. In 2025–26, the grade school’s fifth-grade science proficiency was 52%, 4 points above the state; the high school’s 11th-grade ACT ELA result was 56%, 6 points above. At the other end, the grade school’s all-grades ELA and math results were well below the state. The high school’s results vary, too: ninth- and 10th-grade PreACT ELA were 5 and 6 points below the state, while PreACT science was 4 points below in ninth grade and 8 points below in 10th. Chronic absenteeism was below the state at both schools—20% at the grade school and 18% at the high school—but the high school’s graduation rate was 80%, about 10 points below the state.

Recent changes are mixed: the grade school’s all-grades ELA fell 3 points and its gap with the state widened 6 points; math fell 10 points and its gap widened 11. By contrast, fifth-grade science rose 41 points, and 11th-grade ACT ELA rose 41 points, moving from below to above the state. SchoolDigger ranks the grade school at the 39th percentile with 2 stars and the high school at the 52nd percentile with 3 stars; the grade school’s percentile rank rose from 4th in 2023–24, while the high school’s latest rank improved from the prior year but remained below its earlier level. The high school also had a lower 2024–25 student-teacher ratio (8.8 versus 12.9) and a lower share of students free/reduced lunch eligible that year (45% versus 55%); these are contextual differences, not explanations for results. The schools serve different grades, so their results are not a like-for-like comparison.