School City of Mishawaka

School City of Mishawaka is a 10-school Indiana district serving about 5,000 students in grades PK–12: seven elementary schools, one middle school (John J Young Middle School), a comprehensive high school (Mishawaka High School), and a virtual academy covering grades 6–12. The district is rated 1 star and ranks 272nd of 374 Indiana districts. Enrollment is uneven — Mishawaka High School alone holds about a quarter of all district students — and performance varies widely between schools, so district averages can hide as much as they show.

Twin Branch Elementary School is the academic standout, with math proficiency of 57.14% — close to double the district's 29.19% — plus strong science scores and chronic absenteeism of 14.5%, below the state's 16.7%. Fred J Hums Elementary School combines above-district reading and math with the district's lowest chronic absenteeism (12.4%), lowest per-student spending ($10,385), and the largest classes. Beiger Elementary School and Battell Elementary School are the improvers: Battell climbed from the 24th to the 40th percentile and Beiger from the 13th to the 29th, and Battell has the smallest classes at 12.9 students per teacher. Note that Twin Branch and Hums have each slipped over the past three years (from 4 stars to 3).

Cavemen Academy of Virtual Excellence is the district's outlier: a 51.9% graduation rate against the state's 89.7%, math proficiency of 4.17% (the lowest in this data set), a reported 0% in 8th-grade math, and the highest free/reduced-lunch share at 67.9%. It is small and has incomplete data, so comparisons are limited. Mishawaka High School graduates 88.7% of its students — about the state rate — yet 42.8% are chronically absent, more than double the state figure. District-wide, chronic absenteeism is 28.6% versus 16.7% statewide, and while every elementary school posts higher math than reading proficiency, math drops sharply in middle and high school.