Prairie Lincoln Elementary School

Prairie Lincoln Elementary School is a K–4 school at 4900 Amesbury Way on Columbus's west side, serving 515 students in the South-Western City district, in a neighborhood where roughly 79% of students come from economically disadvantaged families.

On Ohio's 2025–26 state report card, Prairie Lincoln Elementary School ranks 1,296th of 1,560 schools — the 17th percentile, or 1 star — which is below its own district's 34th percentile (2 stars). Test scores reflect that: 36.2% of third graders and 47.6% of fourth graders were proficient in math, while third-grade English language arts came in at 33.0% and fourth-grade ELA at 40.8%. Those figures trail the district by 15–22 points and the state by 20–30 points in every tested subject, with third-grade reading the weakest spot. This is not a sudden dip — the school has held 1 star and stayed below the 30th percentile for a decade, and it slipped 5 percentile points from last year. One clear bright spot: chronic absenteeism fell from 42.6% to 22.8% over four years, so the school now beats the district's 32.1% rate by nearly 10 points.

Comparisons with nearby schools are revealing. Prairie Norton Elementary School, just 0.72 miles away in the same district with almost identical enrollment (510) and poverty rate (76.7%), posts 72.8% fourth-grade math proficiency versus Prairie Lincoln's 47.6% — a 25-point gap. Darby Woods Elementary School leads the cluster at the 38th percentile with the lowest absenteeism, while Stiles Elementary School trails Prairie Lincoln on nearly every measure. Hilliard Horizon Elementary School, 2.5 miles away, shows what higher spending and lower poverty can produce. Notably, Prairie Lincoln spends the least of its same-district peers yet outperforms Stiles, so money and class size don't explain its results — and English language learners rank among the lowest-scoring groups in the state here, making language support the most actionable priority.