Summary:
Pope County CUD 1 serves 442 students in two schools: Pope County Elementary School, which covers prekindergarten through grade 8, and Pope County High School, which serves grades 9–12. Their different grade spans mean families should focus on each school’s results against state figures for the same grade and subject. The clearest strength is Elementary’s 2025–26 all-grades ELA result: 67%, 10 percentage points above the state rate.
Pope County Elementary stands out for ELA overall, but results vary by grade and subject: grade 3 and grade 4 ELA were each 77%, while grade 6 was 48%, 11 points below state. All-grades math was even with state at 40%; both reported science results were below state, by 17 points in grade 5 and 11 in grade 8. The available achievement results place Pope County High below state: grade 9 ELA was 39% versus 62%, and its latest graduation rate was 81% versus 90%. High’s chronic absenteeism, however, was 18%, 5 points below the state rate; Elementary’s was 29%, 5 points above. Many other 2025–26 high-school scores and some elementary grade-level math scores are suppressed, so they cannot support a fuller comparison.
Elementary’s all-grades results improved from 2024–25: ELA rose 18 points to 67%, moving from 4 points below state to 10 points above; math rose 3 points to 40%, matching the state rate. High’s grade 9 ELA increased slightly, from 38.5% to 38.7%, while its gap to state narrowed by 1 point but remained 23 points. SchoolDigger’s rankings also moved in opposite directions: Elementary rose from the 44th percentile in 2023–24 to the 57th in 2025–26, while High fell from the 36th percentile in 2022–23 to the 23rd in 2024–25. As context, both schools reported free/reduced lunch eligible in 2024–25: 51% at Elementary and 59% at High. Their student-teacher ratios were similar, at 12.0 and 11.3, respectively.
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