Riverside Elementary School

Riverside Elementary School is a PK-4 public school in Columbia, Tennessee, serving 380 students as part of the Maury County Schools district, which ranks modestly below the state average. Riverside itself, however, is among the lowest-performing elementary schools in Tennessee, placing in the 6th percentile statewide (958 out of 1,019 schools) with a 0-star rating. Test scores tell a stark story: only 6.7% of Riverside students are proficient in math, compared to 38.1% across Maury County and 43% statewide. ELA proficiency is 19.3% versus 35.1% for the district, and science is 21.5% versus 39.2%. Every student subgroup—regardless of income, gender, or learning needs—performs in the bottom 11% of the state, indicating school-wide challenges rather than issues isolated to any particular group.

The school spends $15,400 per student, which is more than several much higher-performing schools in the same district. For example, Marvin Wright Elementary School spends roughly $11,900 per student and achieves 53.6% math proficiency with a 70th percentile ranking, while Spring Hill Elementary School ranks in the 83rd percentile with 59.2% math proficiency. Just twelve miles away, Longview Elementary School in Williamson County Schools ranks in the 93rd percentile with 73.1% math proficiency—more than ten times Riverside's rate. This disconnect between spending and outcomes suggests that additional resources alone are not translating into academic gains for Riverside students.

Riverside also saw an alarming single-year drop in math proficiency, falling from 19.1% to 6.7% between 2024-25 and 2025-26. Chronic absenteeism remains a concern at 17.8%, though this is a meaningful improvement from 24.4% the previous year. There is, however, one encouraging sign: in 2021-22, Riverside's English learner students ranked at the 81st percentile, showing that with targeted programming the school can dramatically improve outcomes. The challenge now is sustaining that kind of success in a building that has shown no consistent upward trend over the past decade.