Summary:
Waterloo, Indiana has just one middle school: DeKalb Middle School, which serves grades 6 through 8 and enrolls 759 students within the DeKalb County Ctl United School District (ranked 181st of 374 statewide, 52nd percentile, 3 stars). Because there is only one middle school in the city, the useful comparisons are against the district, the state, and the school's own prior years. Roughly 45.85% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the student–teacher ratio is 16.4 to 1, and per-student spending was $10,631 in 2023–24.
The clearest strength is English language arts. Eighth-grade ELA proficiency of 48.02% is the only grade-level subject score in this data set that beats the Indiana state figure (44%), and ELA climbs steadily across the grades — 35.29% in 6th, 40.37% in 7th, and 48.02% in 8th. Attendance is a second bright spot: chronic absenteeism of 13.2% sits 3.5 points below the state's 16.7% and essentially matches the district's 13.1%, a genuine accomplishment for a school where nearly half of students come from low-income households. At the grade level, the school's scores track its district within about ±0.4 points in every subject, which indicates the school is performing right at its district's middle-grade norms rather than lagging behind them.
Math is the clear priority area. It trails the state at every grade, and 7th-grade math — 23.39% proficient — is the outlier, 12.5 points below Indiana's 35.9% and roughly 10 points below the school's own 6th-grade math result. At the all-grades level, math (29.20%) sits about 12 points below ELA (41.24%), and science recorded the sharpest year-over-year drop of any subject, falling 8.63 points to 31.37%. Statewide rank has also slid for three straight years, from 148th of 491 (70th percentile, 4 stars) in 2023–24 to 233rd of 486 (52nd percentile) in 2025–26. One caution for parents: the district's all-grades figures span grades 3–8, so they are not an apples-to-apples benchmark for a grades 6–8 school.
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