Summary:
Middle schools in zip code 80836 consist of a single school, Stratton Middle School, serving grades 6–8 in the small rural community of Stratton, Colorado, within School District No. R-4. With only 54 students, Stratton Middle is a very small school where a single grade cohort may have just 15–20 students, making year-to-year results highly variable.
Stratton Middle consistently trails both its district and the state in nearly every subject. In the 2025–26 school year, all-grades ELA proficiency reached 32.6%, compared to 35.8% for the district and 44.7% for the state. Math proficiency was just 21.7% at the school, far below the district’s 31.6% and the state’s 37.3%. The most encouraging trend is in ELA: proficiency jumped from 18% in 2024–25 to 32.6% in 2025–26, a large gain of 14.6 percentage points that narrowed the gap to the state from 26.8 points to 12.1 points. Math, however, slipped slightly from 24% to 21.7% during the same period, while the district and state both improved, widening the school’s math deficit relative to its peers.
Eighth-grade students at Stratton Middle outperformed the school’s overall grades 6–8 averages in 2025–26, with ELA proficiency at 37.5% and math at 31.3%—both matching the district’s 8th-grade results exactly, suggesting Stratton may be the only school in the district serving that grade. About 2 in 5 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the student-teacher ratio is 19:1. Historically, Stratton Middle ranked in the 66th percentile of Colorado middle schools in 2007–08, but fell to the 27th percentile by 2010–11 and only recovered to the 33rd percentile by 2012–13. No newer rankings are available, likely due to its small size. While math remains a clear challenge, the recent ELA improvement offers a hopeful sign for this small, rural school.
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