Summary:
Elementary Schools located in North Marion School District 15 consist of two schools serving the Aurora, Oregon area from a single campus on Grim Rd NE: North Marion Primary School for grades PK–2 (285 students) and North Marion Intermediate School for grades 3–5 (345 students), together enrolling about 630 children. Both serve an extremely high-poverty population — 86.67% of Intermediate students and 91.93% of Primary students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The district as a whole ranks near the bottom of Oregon (133rd of 141 districts).
Only the Intermediate School has test results, because Oregon's state testing begins in third grade. There, proficiency trails the state by roughly 11 to 14 points in every subject. Math is the weakest area: 5th-grade math proficiency is 14.8% (about 1 in 7 students) and 3rd-grade math is 21.9%, compared with 32.4% and 41.3% statewide. Reading and writing (ELA) is the one area moving upward, rising from 28.7% in 3rd grade to 30.3% in 4th and 33.0% in 5th — still below state levels. The Intermediate School has earned 1 star for three straight years, and its statewide rank slipped from the 28th to the 23rd to the 17th percentile.
Both schools' strongest metric is attendance: chronic absenteeism is 30.2% at the Intermediate and 30.1% at the Primary, below the 33.5% district and state rate — a genuine achievement given the poverty levels, though about 3 in 10 students are still chronically absent. The Primary School spends $22,918 per student versus $19,062 at the Intermediate and has slightly smaller classes (13.5 vs. 14.6 students per teacher), but it serves a higher-poverty population and has no test data, so the two schools' academic results cannot be directly compared.
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