Summary:
Zip code 24747 is home to a single elementary school, Montcalm Elementary School, a small rural school serving grades PK through 6 with 256 students in the Mercer County Schools district.
For parents considering this area, Montcalm Elementary is a school of striking contrasts. Its overall proficiency rates for the 2025-2026 school year are 37.3% in both Math and English Language Arts (ELA), which places it below state averages but near the district average in Math. The school's greatest strength is clearly its 6th grade, where students achieve 50% proficiency in Math and 56.7% in ELA—dramatically outperforming both district and state averages by significant margins. However, this success is offset by a major weakness in 4th grade, where proficiency plummets to just 20% in Math and 22.5% in ELA, far below district and state levels. This represents a 33-point drop in Math proficiency from 3rd grade to 4th grade, suggesting a potential transition issue or a particularly challenging cohort. The school's state ranking has also been volatile, swinging from 211th in 2023-2024 to 282nd in 2024-2025, before recovering to 250th in 2025-2026.
The student-teacher ratio of 12.1 is favorable, allowing for smaller class sizes and more individualized attention. The 6th-grade success demonstrates the school's capacity for high achievement, but the inconsistent performance across grades and subjects—such as 3rd grade showing strong Math (53.3%) but weaker ELA (40%)—indicates that results are heavily influenced by specific cohorts and teaching teams. Parents should be aware that while the school struggles with consistency, particularly in the middle elementary years, the strong 6th-grade outcomes suggest effective instruction is possible and may be replicable across other grades with the right interventions.
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