Summary:
The New Castle Area School District in Pennsylvania has only one middle school, New Castle Junior High School, which serves grades 6-8. The school has consistently performed poorly, ranking in the bottom 20% of Pennsylvania middle schools over the past three years and earning a 1-star rating from SchoolDigger.
New Castle Junior High School's academic achievement is significantly below state averages across all subjects and grade levels. In the 2023-2024 school year, the school's proficiency rates in Math, Science, and English Language Arts were just 11.3%, 27.9%, and 18.4%, respectively, compared to the state averages of 40.4%, 65.8%, and 53%. The school's dropout rate for the 2022-2023 school year was 1.6%, and it has a very high percentage of students (99.58%) receiving free or reduced-price lunch, indicating a high level of economic disadvantage among the student population.
Despite the school's higher-than-average per-student spending of $13,237 for the 2021-2022 school year, the academic outcomes remain poor. This suggests that simply increasing funding may not be enough to drive meaningful improvements in student performance, and that other factors, such as instructional quality, school leadership, and targeted interventions, may be more critical. The school's consistently low performance and the district's overall low ranking of 515 out of 610 districts in Pennsylvania indicate that the school and district face significant challenges in improving student outcomes.
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