Summary
Cimarron High is a small, rural public high school in Cimarron, New Mexico — a Colfax County town in the north-central part of the state — serving grades 9–12 with about 64 students, roughly 16 per grade. It is the secondary campus of the small Cimarron Municipal Schools district, and because there are no other schools within 20 miles, the fair comparisons are to the district and to New Mexico overall. Its 2025–2026 rank of 28th out of 132 New Mexico high schools (79th percentile) is its best in a decade, up from around the 60th percentile in the mid-2010s, and it has earned 4 stars in eight of ten years.
Reading and science are the school's clear strengths. In 2025–2026, 11th-grade English Language Arts proficiency was 50% (52.63% on SAT School Day) versus 36.78% (37.07%) statewide, and science was 60% (63.16% on NM-ASR) versus 34.02% (34.27%) — nearly double the state rate. Classes are very small, with an 8.6:1 student-teacher ratio in 2024–25, which for 64 students works out to roughly seven or eight teachers. The school reported 100% free/reduced-lunch eligibility in 2024–25, up from 55.26% the year before, which most likely reflects a change in meal-program reporting rather than a sudden economic shift; poverty levels are high either way. Low-income students ranked in the 79th percentile statewide in 2024–25.
Two areas are less settled. School-level math results for 2025–2026 are suppressed by the state for privacy, so math proficiency here is simply unmeasured — a reporting limitation, not a performance finding. Graduation rate is the soft spot, swinging from 63.7% (2019–20) to 93.7% (2020–21) to 66.0% (2021–22); with about 16 graduates per class, a single student moves the rate by more than 6 points, and those years had pandemic-altered rules. Recent figures are reported district-level only (83.1% in 2022–23, 86.5% in 2023–24), both above the state. Notably, the district's reported 2025–26 results outscore the school's in every subject, which may reflect another campus or how cohorts are aggregated.
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