Marin County Office of Education

Marin County Office of Education has two schools serving grades K–12: an alternative special education school with 215 students and a high school serving grades 7–12 with 64 students, for 279 students total. The clearest shared concern is chronic absenteeism: in 2025–2026, it was 42% at Marin County Special Education and 64% at Marin’s Community, both above the state’s 18% rate and the district’s 33% rate.

Marin’s Community stands out as the only school with reported, unsuppressed all-grades test scores, but the available results do not establish which school performs better because Marin County Special Education’s scores are unknown. In 2025–2026, Marin’s Community had 16% proficiency in ELA, 33 points below the state, and 0% in math, 38 points below. Its absenteeism rate was 22 points higher than the other school’s. It also had a 74% graduation rate—14 points above the district rate—but a 26% dropout rate, 18 points above the state rate.

Marin’s Community’s ELA proficiency rose from 5% in 2024–2025 to 16% in 2025–2026, an 11-point gain, while math remained at 0%; its gap with the state narrowed in ELA but widened in math. SchoolDigger’s ranking also moved from rank 2,139 of 2,162, in the 1st percentile with zero stars, to rank 1,843 of 2,137, in the 14th percentile with one star; these rankings are not test-score changes. Context differs too: in 2024–2025, the student-teacher ratios were 18.7 at Marin’s Community and 7.4 at Marin County Special Education, and free/reduced lunch eligible measures were 69% and 33%, respectively. These are different school types and grade spans, so the figures do not explain why their outcomes differ.