Summary
Helix Charter School is a K–12 school serving 190 students as the only school in Helix School District 1, a small rural district in Umatilla County, Oregon, where a single campus covers thirteen grade levels — roughly 14–15 students per grade. Its graduation rate was 100% in four of the last five school years and stayed above Oregon's state rate (81–83%) in every one of them, including a 87.5% year. Chronic absenteeism is the school's most convincing trend: it has fallen for four straight years, from 31.8% to 17.6%, while the state rate held in the low-to-mid 30s — Helix now sits at roughly half the state's rate. On 2025–2026 state tests, students scored 57.1% proficient in English language arts (state: 43.8%) and 45.9% in math (state: 32.9%), both about 13 points above state, while science was only 2 points above (32.6% vs 30.6%).
The elementary and middle grades are where the school looks strongest. In 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 8th grades, Helix beat the state in both reading and math, often by wide margins — 6th-grade math was 66.7% proficient against a state rate of 29.7%, and 3rd-grade reading was 70.6% against 41.5%. 7th grade was the exception, falling below state in both subjects (37.5% vs 45.3% in ELA; 28.6% vs 33.3% in math), and 5th grade was tied in ELA but 3 points behind in math.
Eleventh grade shows the sharpest split: 64.3% proficient in ELA (state: 46%) but just 15.4% in both math (state: 22.9%) and science (state: 33.8%) — an 18-point science gap in the same group of students. Read grade-level results with care: with roughly a dozen to eighteen students per tested class, a single student can shift a grade's percentage by 5–8 points. Spending is high at $24,321 per student with a student–teacher ratio of 10.9, and free/reduced-lunch data is not reported, so it's unknown rather than zero. The nearest school, InterMountain Virtual Learning Academy (15.4 miles away, 107 students, part of InterMountain Education Service District), publishes no achievement, graduation, or attendance data, so no outcome comparison with a nearby school is possible.
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