Summary:
Buffalo, Wyoming, has five schools—two elementary, one middle and two high schools—serving students from the elementary grades through high school, with 1,022 students enrolled across the schools. Enrollment ranges from 29 at New West High School to 317 at Buffalo High School. The clearest area-wide strength is math: all three schools with 2025–26 results were above state averages for their reported grades, while English language arts (ELA) results were more mixed, especially at Cloud Peak Elementary.
Clear Creek Middle School and Buffalo High stand out most. Clear Creek averaged 12.1 percentage points above the state in ELA, 18.6 points above in math and 19.0 points above in grade 8 science; SchoolDigger ranked it 6th of 76 middle schools and gave it five stars. Buffalo High averaged 14.9 points above the state in ELA and 22.5 points above in math, and exceeded the state by 8.2 points in grade 10 science; SchoolDigger ranked it 9th of 81 high schools, also with five stars. Cloud Peak is the main concern: its ELA average was 4.0 points below the state, including grade 3 at 12.0 points below, though its math average was 3.5 points above. SchoolDigger ranked it 72nd of 148 elementary schools and awarded three stars.
Recent changes reinforce those contrasts: Buffalo High’s matched-grade averages rose 8.5 points in ELA and 13.5 in math from 2024–25, while Cloud Peak’s ELA average fell 4.9 points and its SchoolDigger percentile declined from 70 in 2023–24 to 51 in 2025–26. Clear Creek’s percentile rose from 89 to 92 over that span. Income and staffing measures offer context, not an explanation: in 2024–25, free/reduced-lunch eligibility was similar at Clear Creek (37.1%) and Cloud Peak (36.0%), and their student-teacher ratios were 10.6 and 10.5. New West’s 2024–25 graduation rate was 78.6%, below the state’s 83.1%, but its latest WY-TOPP school results are suppressed; Meadowlark has no test scores in the supplied data.
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