Summary:
Nehalem, Oregon has a single public school: Nehalem Elementary School, serving about 171 students in grades PK–5 as part of Neah-Kah-Nie School District 56. Because there are no middle or high schools in town, families attend this one building through fifth grade and then move elsewhere for secondary school — so this school's results are the entire local picture rather than one piece of a larger in-town comparison.
By state standards, the school performs well. In 2025-26, its students scored above the Oregon average in all three tested subjects: 55.7% proficient in English language arts versus 43.8% statewide, 42.5% in math versus 32.9%, and 43.3% in science versus 30.6%. It has held a four-star rating for three straight years and sits in the top 28% of Oregon elementary schools. It manages this while 80.7% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and its district ranks 10th of 141 Oregon districts. Chronic absenteeism, at 32.9%, is slightly better than both the state (33.5%) and the district (37.7%), though it still means roughly one in three students misses enough school to be flagged.
Two things are worth watching. Fifth-grade math is the one weak spot: at 27.6% proficient it falls below the state's 32.4%, and the district's nearly identical 27.1% suggests a grade-wide issue rather than something unique to this school. The school's statewide rank has also slipped three years running, from the 85th percentile to 76th to 72nd — still solid, but a trend rather than noise. Per-student spending is high at $26,184, with a 14.7-to-1 student-teacher ratio, which is typical of small rural schools that lack economies of scale.
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