Summary:
Zip code 35204 in Birmingham, Alabama is home to exactly one middle school, Wilkerson Middle School, which serves grades 6-8 within the Birmingham City School District.
For parents considering this area, Wilkerson Middle School serves 424 students, nearly 88% of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch, indicating a high-poverty student body. The school faces significant academic challenges, particularly in mathematics, where proficiency rates are alarmingly low—just 5.61% in 6th grade, 2.70% in 7th grade, and 2.76% in 8th grade. English Language Arts performance is stronger but still well below state averages, with proficiency ranging from 20.56% in 6th grade to 29.66% in 8th grade. Science shows a notable bright spot, with 8th grade proficiency at 28.97%, nearly matching the district average and far exceeding the school's math scores. The student-teacher ratio is a concerning 35.3:1, suggesting significant resource constraints despite per-student spending of $10,839.
Encouragingly, the school demonstrated dramatic year-over-year improvement between 2024-2025 and 2025-2026, with gains in nearly every subject—most notably an increase of 13.75 percentage points in 8th grade science and 10.09 points in 8th grade ELA. Perhaps the most striking finding is the school's remarkably low chronic absenteeism rate of just 5.6%, less than half the district average of 13.1% and well below the state's 12.0%. This suggests strong student engagement and attendance systems that could serve as a foundation for future growth. While the school's state ranking has fluctuated (from the 9th percentile to the 2nd, then recovering to the 6th), the broad-based improvement in recent data indicates the school may be stabilizing and building momentum, even as it remains in the bottom 6% of Alabama middle schools.
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