Best Public Schools in Topsfield, MA

Topsfield, Massachusetts has two public schools serving a combined 598 students, and no high school appears in this data set. Steward Elementary covers grades PK–3 with 347 students, about 58% of enrollment, and Proctor Elementary covers grades 4–6 with 251 students, about 42%. Both are part of the Topsfield district. Test results are MCAS Next Generation percentage proficient for 2025–2026 and 2024–2025. Because Steward tests only grade 3, its "All Grades" score is effectively a third-grade score, while Proctor's science score comes from fifth grade only. Free/reduced-lunch figures are blank for both schools, so they are treated as unknown rather than zero.

Steward posts the strongest core results: 61.97% proficient in ELA and 56.34% in math in 2025–2026, compared with Proctor's 54.13% ELA and 51.63% math, the district's 55.38% and 52.19%, and the state's 40.03% and 41.11%. Steward's all-grade ELA is 7.84 points higher than Proctor's and its math 4.71 points higher, though the schools serve different grades, so the comparison is not apples-to-apples. Proctor's bright spots are science at 55.84% — above the district's 55.13% and far above the state's 40.98% — plus the highest single-grade scores in the data set: 66.27% in sixth-grade ELA, 26.01 points above state, and 58.14% in fourth-grade math, 14.94 points above state.

Both schools outperform the state in every reported area. Proctor's internal grade variation is large: ELA ranges from 43.24% in fifth grade to 66.27% in sixth, a 23.03-point gap, and math from 46.99% in sixth to 58.14% in fourth, an 11.15-point gap. Proctor's science fell from 72.62% to 55.84%, but district science fell similarly, from 73.26% to 55.13%, while state science dipped only 0.53 points — a local decline, not a Proctor-only one. Year over year, Topsfield scores generally declined more than the state. Steward spends $19,355 per student versus Proctor's $18,943, with student-teacher ratios of 11.1 and 10.4; without current spending and lunch data, these comparisons are descriptive only.