Summary:
Zip code 26764 is home to a single public school, Terra Alta/East Preston School, which serves students from Pre-Kindergarten through 8th grade in a rural West Virginia setting, with a total enrollment of 283 students.
As the only school in the area, Terra Alta/East Preston School offers a complete educational path for local families from early childhood through middle school. The school is part of the Preston County Schools district, which holds a 3-star rating and ranks 29th out of 54 districts in West Virginia. The school itself has a stable but modest state ranking, sitting at 240th out of 355 schools (32nd percentile) for the 2025-2026 school year, with little change over the past three years. One of the most notable structural advantages is the favorable student-teacher ratio of 12.8, which allows for more individualized attention than many schools can offer.
Academically, the school shows a distinct pattern of early success followed by later struggles, particularly in mathematics. The 3rd-grade math proficiency rate is an impressive 66.7%, far exceeding both the district (53.1%) and state (54.4%) averages. However, this strength drops dramatically in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades, where proficiency falls to around 25-27%, before recovering somewhat in 8th grade. English Language Arts performance is similarly inconsistent, with a strong 6th-grade score of 55% (beating the state average of 47.4%) but a weak 7th-grade score of just 30%. Overall proficiency across all grades is slightly below state averages in math (34.3% vs. 39.4%) and ELA (42.7% vs. 47.6%), though science performance is nearly on par with the state. The school spends $10,355 per student, and while it generally underperforms its district, it does have pockets of excellence—like 3rd-grade math and 6th-grade ELA—that could serve as models for improvement in other grade levels.
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