Summary:
ZIP code 96821, in east Honolulu, is served by a single public middle school: Niu Valley Middle School, which serves grades 6 through 8 and enrolls 786 students — roughly 262 per grade. It is part of the Hawaii Department of Education. Because there is only one middle school in this ZIP code, there are no local peers to compare it with; the most useful way to judge it is by its own three-year record and by how it stacks up against the roughly 85 Hawaii middle schools that receive a statewide rank.
On that statewide measure, Niu Valley is a consistently strong performer. It ranked 5th of 89 Hawaii middle schools in 2023-24, 7th of 84 in 2024-25, and 4th of 85 in 2025-26 — the 95th percentile, with a five-star rating each year. Test scores rose in every subject: English language arts proficiency went from 69 to 71, science from 67 to 71, and math from 50 to 56. Math remains the clear soft spot — at 56 it still trails ELA by 15 points, though that gap narrowed from 19 points the year before. Keep in mind that science is measured by the HSA while ELA and math use Smarter Balanced tests, so those numbers are not directly comparable.
School context matters too. Chronic absenteeism stands at 11.0 percent, meaning roughly 1 in 9 students misses 10 percent or more of school days — a low rate for a school this size. About 12.21 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the student-teacher ratio is 16 to 1, implying roughly 49 teachers. Per-student spending is listed at $14,536, but that figure dates to 2018-19 and is several years old, so treat it as background rather than current. Overall, families in this area have one middle school, and it is a stable top-5-percent school statewide whose clearest remaining challenge is mathematics.
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