Summary:
Elementary Schools in zip code 28338 consist of a single school, Mineral Springs Elementary, serving grades PK through 5 in the Ellerbe area within Richmond County Schools. This school, Mineral Springs Elementary, enrolls 441 students, and nearly all of them (99.32%) qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting a deeply high-poverty community. Despite these economic challenges, the school demonstrates a distinct academic split between mathematics and reading.
In math, Mineral Springs Elementary performs close to the state average and well above its own district. For 2025-2026, schoolwide math proficiency is about 60.3%, compared to 48.3% for Richmond County Schools and 63.6% for North Carolina. The standout grade is 4th grade, where 70.8% of students are proficient in math, exceeding the district by 23.3 points and the state by 9.4 points. Reading is the critical weakness: only about 37.5% of students are proficient schoolwide, nearly 19 points below the state average, and no grade exceeds 42%. Science proficiency in 5th grade is 52.0%, trailing both the district (56.7%) and the state (67.7%).
Year-over-year changes reveal volatile results. From 2024-2025 to 2025-2026, 5th grade math improved by 7 points, but 4th and 5th grade reading each fell by roughly 10 points. As a result, the school’s state ranking dropped steeply from the 52nd percentile in 2023-2024 to the 25th percentile in 2025-2026, now earning just 1 star. Chronic absenteeism is a relative bright spot at 21.2%, notably below the district's 28.0% and only slightly above the state average. With a 18.3:1 student-teacher ratio, Mineral Springs Elementary shows strong math instruction in a very high-poverty setting, but improving literacy in the upper grades is the key to reversing its ranking decline.
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