Summary:
The city of Coats, North Carolina, has a single public school, Coats Elementary, which serves students in grades PK–5 and operates under the Harnett County Schools district. Because this is a one-school case study, the insights below focus entirely on Coats Elementary and how it compares to its district and state benchmarks.
Coats Elementary is a high-poverty school with about 97% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. In the 2025–2026 school year, its overall EOG proficiency averaged 35.7%, compared to 53.6% for the district and 61.0% statewide, leaving the school at the 4th percentile of North Carolina elementary schools. The most urgent concerns are third-grade reading, where only 28.3% of students are proficient (down 5 points from the prior year), and fifth-grade science, where 34.1% are proficient — a 33.6-point gap behind the state average. Meanwhile, the school’s math proficiency improved in every tested grade, though still far below district and state averages. The student-teacher ratio is 13.6:1, and chronic absenteeism stands at 23.1%, which is lower than both the district rate of 26.9% and the state rate of 24.2%.
The school’s state ranking has declined sharply over two years, from the 11th percentile in 2023–2024 to the 4th percentile in 2025–2026, even though its own test scores stayed roughly flat. That happened because district and state averages improved much faster than Coats Elementary. The surrounding district is itself below the state median, yet Coats Elementary is far below its district average, indicating challenges concentrated at this school rather than across the county. For parents, the picture is mixed: attendance is a relative strength, math shows modest year-over-year gains, but early reading and fifth-grade science need urgent attention. Since Coats has no local middle or high school, families should look ahead to feeder schools in Harnett County Schools to understand the full educational pathway.
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