Dulce Elementary

Dulce Elementary is a PK–5 school in Dulce, New Mexico — a community in Rio Arriba County on the Jicarilla Apache Nation — serving 264 students as part of the Dulce Independent Schools district. It is also the only school within 20 miles, so there is no nearby campus to compare it against; the meaningful benchmarks are the district and the state.

On academics, Dulce Elementary has ranked at the very bottom of New Mexico schools for more than a decade. Across ten reported years it never rose above the 6th percentile statewide and carried a 0-star rating every year. In 2025–26, 19.57% of students were proficient in language arts against a state average of 43.34%, and 5.07% in math against 25.54%. Science is reported only as "under 20%," below the state's roughly 33%. One caution: at each grade level the school's scores are identical to the district's, so district comparisons come close to comparing the school to itself. The state average is the only genuinely independent yardstick.

There is a real bright spot. English language arts climbed from 12% proficiency in 2023–24 to about 19.6–20% and has held for two years, and 4th grade ELA reached 30% — the strongest result in the data, though with roughly 30–40 students per grade it may reflect a small group. Math moved the opposite way, falling from 10% to about 4–6%, and that decline appears to be what keeps the overall ranking at the bottom. Class sizes are small — about 8.2 students per teacher — so staffing ratios do not look like the limiting factor. Nearly all students (98.86–100%) qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.