Summary:
The East Carroll Parish school district in Louisiana serves three public schools—Southside Elementary School (PK-5), Griffin Middle School Academy (6-8), and General Trass High School (9-12)—with a student population facing very high economic need, as free/reduced lunch rates exceed 92% across all schools.
The standout school is General Trass High School, which shows a remarkable positive trajectory. It is the only school outperforming the district average in both Math (43% vs. 24%) and English Language Arts (49% vs. 34%), and it achieves proficiency at or above state averages in key End-of-Course exams like U.S. History (73% vs. 55% state), Biology (71% vs. 60% state), and English II (68% vs. 67% state). Its state ranking has jumped from the 29th percentile to the 52nd percentile in three years, and it boasts a high graduation rate of 93.8% with a very low dropout rate of 0.4%. In contrast, Southside Elementary School is the lowest-performing school, ranking 687th out of 690 elementary schools in Louisiana (0th percentile) with critically low proficiency rates—just 21% in Math and 32% in ELA—and a high chronic absenteeism rate of 25.0%. Griffin Middle School Academy falls in the middle, with Math proficiency at 22% and ELA at 35%, but its 6th-grade Math score of 17% is far below the state average of 60%.
Key takeaways include a clear "middle school slide" where performance drops before recovering at the high school level, and an inverse relationship between student-teacher ratios and outcomes—General Trass High School has the best results with the lowest ratio (9.5:1), while Southside Elementary has the worst results with the highest ratio (15.3:1). Chronic absenteeism is a critical differentiator: General Trass has the lowest rate (10.3%), well below the state average of 22.5%, while Southside has the highest (25.0%). This district presents a story of two extremes, where a struggling elementary and middle school experience contrasts sharply with a high school that is genuinely competitive statewide.
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