Valdese Elementary

Set in Valdese, North Carolina, Valdese Elementary is a middle-of-the-pack primary school, one of the schools within Burke County Schools. It educates 530 students across grades pre-K through 5.

Burke County Schools comprises 26 schools with combined enrollment of 11,667 students; Valdese Elementary is among them.

On demographics, Valdese Elementary logs that the largest single group is White, at 80% of enrollment. The remainder looks like 8% Hispanic, 5% Asian, 5% multiracial, 2% Black. That mix tracks the wider county fairly closely.

On the resource side, Valdese Elementary logs 30 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 17.8:1. That figure is higher than the state norm's 14.9:1 average. Roughly 99% of students at Valdese Elementary qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Valdese Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 48.5%, the actual is 59.2%, a residual of +10.7 points.

Around the school, community-level numbers for Burke County indicate the typical household earns roughly $58,592 per year, roughly 21% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 12%. Valdese Elementary is one of 30 public schools in Burke County (combined enrollment of about 12,360 students).

Heritage Middle is the nearest neighboring public school, about 1.2 miles from this campus. Within five miles, there are 5 other public schools. On composite proficiency, Valdese Elementary comes 4th of 8 in the immediate cluster, higher than the nearby-schools average of 58.2%.

The school occupies a commuter-belt site.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count climbed 31%: 405 students in 2018 compared to 530 in 2025. The student-to-teacher ratio grew from 16.6:1 in 2018 to 17.8:1 today.

On allk12, the feed for Valdese Elementary typically covers science fair prep, picture-day reminders, and bus-route questions. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.