Fort Sumner Elementary

Fort Sumner Elementary is a PK–5 school serving 124 students in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, a small rural community where it is the only school within 20 miles, so the most useful comparisons are with its district, Fort Sumner Municipal Schools, and with New Mexico state averages.

In 2025–2026, the school ranked 144th of 346 New Mexico elementary schools — the 58th percentile, earning 3 stars. That is a step down from the two prior years, when it ranked in the 85th–87th percentile with 4 stars, though it remains above the state median. Math and science are the clearest strengths: all-grade math (32% combined, 31.25% NM-MSSA) beat both the district (27.21%, 29.25%) and the state (25.54%, 27.85%), and 5th grade math (38.89% NM-MSSA) and science (38.89% NM-ASR) were well above state averages. English language arts is above state (50% NM-MSSA vs. 44.66%) but slightly below the district's 51.89%.

About 65% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the student-teacher ratio is a favorable 9.3. Test scores slipped from unusually high levels in 2023–2024 and 2024–2025, when ELA reached 69.23% and the school earned strong effectiveness rankings for low-income and special education students; results in other years were more mixed. With only 124 students, a single cohort can swing results, and 4th grade ELA and math scores were suppressed by the state for privacy — treat those as unknown rather than weak. Overall, this is a small, high-poverty school whose math and science results generally exceed state averages, with a latest ranking in the upper half of the state but below its own recent top-quartile run.