Cascade School District 5

Cascade School District 5 is a six-school district in Oregon serving roughly 2,731 students across three elementary schools, one middle school, and two high schools, and it ranks 21st of 141 Oregon districts — the 85th percentile, with 4 stars. Overall, the district outperforms the state in English language arts (55.7% vs. 43.8%), math (39.4% vs. 32.9%), and science (36.8% vs. 30.6%), and its chronic absenteeism rate of 22.1% is better than the state's 33.5%. Graduation is 84.8%, slightly above the state's 83.0%. The catch is that these averages hide big differences between individual schools.

The strongest schools are Cascade Junior High School, which sits in the 84th percentile with 4 stars, scores 62.0% in ELA, 40.0% in math, and 42.3% in science, and has the district's lowest absenteeism at 16.9%; Cloverdale Elementary School, the smallest elementary at 208 students yet the highest in math (54.7%) and science (45.5%) with the lowest student-teacher ratio (15.3); and Turner Elementary School, a 4-star school scoring above district and state in all three subjects. Cascade Senior High School posts the best graduation rate (94.7%) and ELA (60.2%), but its math score of 28.8% falls below both district and state.

Two schools lag well behind. Aumsville Elementary School is the largest elementary at 576 students but ranks in the 47th percentile with 2 stars, with ELA (39.9%) below state and absenteeism (27.5%) above the district average. Cascade Opportunity Center is the district's most extreme outlier: graduation is 53.7% and absenteeism 55.8%, with math at 9.1% — though its ELA (53.8%) and its rank improvement from the 13th to the 37th percentile are encouraging signs. Notably, per-student spending at Aumsville ($18,935) is close to Cloverdale's ($19,113) despite very different results, and every school serves a very similar share of students from low-income families (about 63–64%), so those factors alone do not explain the gaps.