Earl Nash Elementary

Earl Nash Elementary in Macon, Mississippi, serves 611 students in grades PK-5 in the Noxubee County School District, a high-poverty rural area where 99.67% of students qualified for free/reduced lunch in 2024-25, after two straight years at 100%. The school has ranked in the bottom 5% of Mississippi elementary schools since 2020-21, including a 2025-26 ranking of 368th out of 377 schools (2nd percentile) with 0 stars on SchoolDigger, indicating long-term systemic underperformance rather than a single bad year.

The most useful comparison is KCSD Lower Elementary School, about 19.6 miles away in Scooba, which serves a nearly identical poverty population (98.95% free/reduced lunch) but achieves dramatically better outcomes. In 3rd grade ELA, Earl Nash's proficiency rate was 22.3% in 2025-26 versus 54.1% at KCSD Lower — a gap of nearly 32 points — and the 2024-25 gap was even larger at 49.5 points (18.5% vs. 68.0%). Earl Nash also has a student-teacher ratio of 19.2 to 1 compared to KCSD Lower's 11.8 to 1, and chronic absenteeism of 23.5% in 2023-24 versus 19.5%. These differences suggest that school-level factors like class size, instructional quality, and leadership matter at least as much as the challenges students bring from outside the classroom.

Math is a severe weakness at Earl Nash across all grades: in 2025-26, 3rd grade math proficiency was 22.5% versus the state average of 48.8%, with 4th and 5th grade math at just 12.5% and 14.6%, respectively — roughly 35 points below state averages. ELA results have been volatile, with occasional bright spots such as 4th grade reaching 48.1% proficiency in 2023-24, but those gains did not hold. Science is a relative strength, with 5th grade science at 42.7% in 2025-26, though still below the state's 71.5%. The comparison with KCSD Lower shows that similar demographics do not have to mean similar outcomes, and points to smaller class sizes and stronger early literacy instruction as meaningful priorities for improving Earl Nash.