Elementary Schools in Walpole

Walpole, Massachusetts has four public elementary schools — Fisher, Old Post Road, Elm Street School, and Boyden — all serving Kindergarten through Grade 5 and together enrolling 1,754 students in the Walpole district, which ranks 42nd of 351 Massachusetts districts. The schools are remarkably uniform in size: the largest (Fisher, 463 students) is only about 17% bigger than the smallest (Boyden, 395). Two caveats matter for reading any comparison: free/reduced lunch figures are suppressed for every school, so no poverty-based comparisons are possible, and per-student spending data is from 2020‑2021, five years older than the test results.

Old Post Road is the clear flagship, ranked 10th of 899 Massachusetts elementary schools (99th percentile, 5 stars) and first among the four in all ten school-level test categories, with ELA 70.72, Math 82.43, and Science 83.75. Fisher follows at 57th of 899 (94th percentile, 5 stars) with the second-highest scores in every subject, then Elm Street at 133rd (85th percentile, 4 stars) and Boyden at 188th (79th percentile, 4 stars). Every one of the four schools beats the state average in ELA, Math, and Science in both reported years — but the internal gap is wide, with a 34.7-point Science spread between Old Post Road and Boyden.

The trends are where the schools diverge most. Boyden is the most improved, climbing from 331st to 188th statewide and from 3 to 4 stars, with Math up 5.32 points — yet its Science score of 49.02 is the lowest value in the data set and 16.61 points below the district average. Elm Street is the only school losing ground in math (−6.44 points), which pushed it just below the district math average. Fisher is strong overall but posts the district's lowest grade-3 ELA score (58.02), 7.6 points below the district grade-3 average. Notably, resource inputs do not track outcomes here: Boyden has the highest spending and lowest student-teacher ratio but the lowest scores, while Old Post Road has the lowest spending and highest ratio and the highest scores — a reminder not to read spending or class size as a proxy for quality in this small sample.