Arkansas school safety

Paragould School District has records complete enough to score for six of the seven schools in its scored set, and it ranks safer than 94% of ranked districts nationwide. Both halves of that sentence matter: enough of its schools reported, and what they reported held up under comparison. That is the pairing this page is built to find, and it is not the ordinary case in Arkansas.

Of the 1,099 Arkansas schools in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection, 574 carry a published safety score. We publish a score only for schools whose incident reporting we believe — grades A and B. Where a school shows no score, that is the method declining to vouch for the records, not a gap in our data. Some of those schools are small enough that a year with no incidents is entirely ordinary; a small school reporting nothing is plausible, but it isn't evidence of safety either.

For 167 Arkansas schools, or 15.2% of the state, we grade the reporting doubtful. These are schools where others of the same size and grade span normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this one reported almost none. Nationally, 11.3% of schools fall in that group. Read the difference carefully. It describes how records were filed, not what happened to children. A doubtful grade means we cannot verify what a school submitted — nothing more. The comparison behind every grade is national and is not adjusted for state, deliberately: state-to-state differences in this collection reflect reporting habits, not child safety.

The 26 ranked districts

There are 285 school districts in Arkansas. Twenty-six have enough scoreable schools to rank at all, because a district needs several schools with believable records before a district-level figure means anything. Alongside Paragould, the highest-ranking are Benton School District, safer than 93% of ranked US districts, with five of the seven schools in its scored set complete enough to score; Pea Ridge School District, safer than 89%, with all five; and Hamburg School District and South Conway County School District, each safer than 88%, each with all five of theirs.

The most useful thing here is your own school. Look it up, then look at its grade before its score.

Safest ranked cities in Arkansas

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Arkansas city with schools

Every Arkansas school district