Summary:
Zip code 23878 (Sedley, VA) is home to exactly one public school, Nottoway Elementary, a PK-5 elementary school in Southampton County Public Schools with 235 students. Because this is the only school in the area, the analysis is a deep dive into a single institution rather than a comparison between local schools. With a 91.49% free/reduced lunch rate, the school serves a high-poverty population, yet it still posts proficiency rates above state averages in most subjects, making it the clear academic cornerstone of the Sedley community.
Nottoway Elementary stands out for its strong reading performance, beating the Virginia state average in every reported English Reading test across both 2024-2025 and 2025-2026. The school also shines in math: 5th graders posted an exceptional 93.75% proficiency rate in 2025-2026, well above the district's 76.88% and the state's 72.39%. Across two years of data, the school outperformed state averages in 13 of 16 subject/grade combinations. However, 3rd grade scores dipped notably in 2025-2026, with math falling from 80.00 to 69.44 and reading from 84.00 to 69.44, a trend worth monitoring as that cohort advances.
One of the school's hidden strengths is attendance: only 3.2% of students were chronically absent in 2024-2025, compared to 8.7% for Southampton County Public Schools and 14.8% statewide, a likely contributor to academic success. The school ranks in the 68th percentile of Virginia elementary schools (3 stars), well above its district's 47th percentile, though its state ranking has slipped from 287th (74th percentile, 4 stars) in 2023-2024. Given the small cohort of just 235 students, year-to-year swings of a few students can shift percentages notably, so the data should be interpreted with some caution — but by most measures, Nottoway Elementary is delivering strong results for its community.
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