Ashland Junior High School

Ashland Junior High School serves 37 students in grades 6–8, and the only nearby comparison provided is South Central Middle School, 16.2 miles away. In 2025–26, Ashland’s math proficiency was 43%, slightly above Kansas’s 41%, but below its district’s 53% and South Central’s 54%. ELA proficiency was 39%, below the state at 46%, the Ashland district at 49%, and South Central at 60%. The clearest concern is ELA: Ashland trails South Central by 21 percentage points.

Ashland’s math results vary sharply by grade: sixth-grade proficiency was 27%, while seventh grade reached 53%; both were below the same grade at South Central. ELA was nearly identical across Ashland’s sixth and seventh grades, at about 40%, but remained below South Central in both. Science was also a relative weakness in the latest year available for both schools: in 2024–25, Ashland scored 27%, compared with 41% statewide, 32% in the Ashland district, and 44% at South Central. Ashland’s 2025–26 science result is not supplied, so this is the latest common-year comparison.

Results have improved over the longer term but have not risen steadily. From 2022–23 to 2025–26, ELA rose 23 percentage points and math rose 17, but math fell 11 points from its 2024–25 peak. SchoolDigger ranked Ashland 199th of 368 schools, at the 46th percentile with 2 stars in 2025–26, down from the 62nd percentile and 3 stars the year before; South Central stood at the 79th percentile with 4 stars. Ashland’s student-teacher ratio was lower (14.5 versus 16.6), and its free/reduced-lunch rate was also lower (49% versus 58%); these are context, not explanations for score differences. SchoolDigger’s subgroup rankings also show a notable shift: White students’ percentile rose from 22 in 2022–23 to 65 in 2024–25, while the ranking for students with low socioeconomic status was at the 6th percentile in 2022–23, compared with 31st percentile overall.