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Mountain Home Public Schools earned B ratings across the board in the 2026 school report cards released Sept. 17 by the Arkansas Department of Education.
Hackler Intermediate School made the biggest move, raising its grade from a C to a B. The school serves third through fifth grades.
It is the second straight year a Mountain Home campus has climbed a letter. In 2025, the high school grouping, which combines Mountain Home High School and Mountain Home Junior High, also rose from a C to a B while the district’s other schools held steady.
“We are incredibly proud of the work happening across Mountain Home Public Schools,” Superintendent Allyson Dewey said. “These scores reflect the dedication our teachers, staff, students, and families put in each day.”
Dewey said the grades still tell only part of the story.
“While we are proud of these results and the growth they represent, a school report card can never fully capture the work happening in our classrooms or the impact our staff members have on students each and every day,” she said.
The new grade caps a busy start to the year at Hackler, led by Principal Kristyn Goodwin. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Education Secretary Jacob Oliva and University of Arkansas basketball coach John Calipari visited the school Aug. 31 after it won the state’s #RazorbackReady2026 fitness challenge.
Arkansas grades its public schools from A to F on a 900-point scale made up of nine equally weighted measures. One-third of a school’s score comes from how students perform in English language arts, math and science on the ATLAS exam, the state test that replaced the ACT Aspire in 2024.
For elementary and middle schools like Hackler, the other two-thirds measures whether students hit their own growth targets from one year to the next. High schools are also scored on how ready students are for life after graduation.
This is the second year of official grades under the formula, which was rewritten after the 2023 LEARNS Act. It is also the second year the state has graded entire districts, using combined data from every school in the district.
Mountain Home’s results match a statewide trend. The education department said 68 more schools earned an A or B this year and 35 fewer received a D or F, putting 15,042 more students in A- or B-rated schools than a year ago.
Schools earning a B saw the largest jump, with 350 statewide, up 58 from last year, according to the Arkansas Advocate. Nearly 45% of the state’s 1,047 schools kept the same grade.
“If kids are learning, you’re going to get a good grade,” Oliva told reporters, according to the Advocate.
Not everyone is sold on the system. The Arkansas Education Association has argued that a grade built on year-end testing cannot measure everything a school provides, and that private schools taking state voucher money are not graded the same way.
Families can look up report cards for any Arkansas school or district at myschoolinfo.arkansas.gov. The state’s School and District Rating Dashboard is at ardatahub.uark.edu.
