Summary:
The Tulia Independent School District (Isd) is home to a single elementary school, Tulia Elementary, which serves students from Pre-Kindergarten through 5th grade with a total enrollment of 364 students in a rural, high-poverty area where 82% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Tulia Elementary faces significant academic challenges, with STAAR test scores consistently far below state averages across all subjects. For the 2025-2026 school year, only about 25% of students were proficient in Reading and Math, compared to state averages of 54% and 47%, respectively. The school's state ranking has steadily declined over the past three years, dropping from the 7th percentile to the 3rd percentile, indicating it is falling further behind even other low-performing schools. A particularly critical weakness is 5th-grade Science, where only 10.45% of students were proficient in 2024-2025, compared to the state average of 29.57%.
Despite these low scores, the school benefits from a favorable student-teacher ratio of 11.6:1 and above-average per-student spending of $12,048, which is higher than the Texas state average. This creates a paradox where significant financial and staffing resources are not translating into academic proficiency, likely because these resources are being directed toward addressing the non-academic needs of a predominantly low-income student body. Performance also varies significantly from year to year by grade level, suggesting that outcomes are heavily influenced by specific student cohorts and individual teachers rather than a consistent curriculum strength or weakness.
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