Chama Valley Indep. Schools

Chama Valley Indep. Schools is a small New Mexico district serving 262 students across three schools: Escalante Middle/High School (grades 7–12, enrollment 134), Tierra Amarilla Elementary (grades PK–6, enrollment 76), and Chama Elementary (grades PK–5, enrollment 52). The area summary lists no separate middle school because middle-grade students are housed inside Escalante. The district is ranked 87 of 87 in the state, at the 0th percentile with 0 stars, and poverty is nearly universal — free/reduced lunch is 98.51% at Escalante and 100% at both elementary schools.

Two bright spots stand out. Tierra Amarilla Elementary has the strongest reported academics in the district: its all-grades math proficiency of 23.26% is close to the state's 25.54% and far above the district's 7.23%, and roughly three times Chama Elementary's 7.56%. Meanwhile, Escalante's graduation rate of 83.5% is above the state's 80.6% by 2.9 percentage points — the only metric in the data where a school exceeds the state. By contrast, Chama Elementary has the lowest student-teacher ratio at 5.5, yet its math proficiency remains low, showing that small classes alone do not guarantee higher test scores.

Language Arts is below the state at all three schools (state: 43.34%), with Escalante lowest at 18.61%, while Tierra Amarilla (25.58%) and Chama (24.37%) sit near the district average of 24.74%. Math is the sharpest weakness: Escalante reports under 5% in multiple math measures and Chama reports 7.56%, both far below the state. Rankings have also slipped over time — Chama fell from 4 stars and the 75th percentile in 2016–2017 to 0 stars and the 2nd percentile recently, and all current school rankings are 0 stars. Note that many test scores are suppressed with “—” or reported as bounds such as “under 5%”; these are unknown, not zeros.