Gold Beach Junior/Senior High School

Gold Beach Junior/Senior High School is a small combined junior/senior high serving 188 students in grades 7 through 12 in Gold Beach, Oregon, a remote community on the southern Oregon coast where no other school exists within 20 miles — so there are no neighboring schools to compare it to, only statewide averages and the school's own history. It is the only secondary school in Central Curry School District 1, which ranks 26th of 141 Oregon districts.

The school's clearest strengths are in English Language Arts and Science. It beats the Oregon average in ELA and Science at every grade level, sometimes by 20 to 30 points — 7th-grade ELA at 77.8% proficient (state: 45.3%) and 7th-grade math at 61.1% (state: 33.3%) are among the strongest results in the file. Its low-income students ranked 1st of 224 statewide in 2022-23, and female students have sat in the top 10% of the state in two recent years. With about 93% of students economically disadvantaged, these are real results from a high-need population. Math is the exception: overall it sits at the state average, but 11th-grade math proficiency is 10.0% against 22.9% statewide, and scores fall steadily from 7th grade to 11th.

The most serious concern is graduation. The rate is 67.5%, about 15.5 points below the state, and it has declined five years in a row (from 77.2%) while Oregon's rate rose — roughly one in three students is not graduating in four years. Chronic absenteeism, at 32.9%, is essentially at the state average, so attendance does not explain it. Note that with only about 30 students per grade, rankings swing widely: the school placed 4th in Oregon in 2022-23 and 86th of 271 in 2025-26. The graduation trend, a multi-year measure, is the more reliable signal.