Keyser Primary School

Keyser Primary School in Keyser, WV, serves 568 students from Pre-K through 4th grade, making it the second-largest elementary school in the Mineral County Schools district. While the school benefits from a favorable 12:1 student-to-teacher ratio and spends about $13,389 per student, its academic performance has consistently placed it in the bottom 10% of West Virginia elementary schools over the past decade.

The most striking concern is the significant achievement gap compared to nearby schools in the same district. In the most recent school year, only 34.4% of Keyser students scored proficient in math and 30% in English Language Arts. By contrast, Fountain Primary School—a much smaller school just a few miles away—achieved 61.1% math and 58.3% ELA proficiency, while Burlington Primary posted 56% in both subjects. Even Frankfort Elementary School, the district's largest school with 713 students, outperformed Keyser by roughly 20 percentage points in math and 15 points in ELA. This pattern suggests that school size alone doesn't explain the results, since both the smallest and largest schools in the district outperform Keyser.

A particularly troubling trend emerges between 3rd and 4th grade. While 38.5% of Keyser 3rd graders were proficient in ELA, that number plummeted to just 21.4% by 4th grade—a 17-point drop that leaves fewer than 1 in 4 students reading at grade level as they transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." This is far below the district average of 39.8% and the state average of 49.6%. The school's performance has also declined over time, falling from the 27th percentile in 2018-2019 to the 7th percentile today. For parents considering this school, it's worth asking administrators about literacy intervention programs and how they plan to address the steep 4th-grade decline, especially given that nearby schools with similar resources are achieving dramatically better outcomes.