Wire Village School

Wire Village School is a K–4 elementary school at 60 Paxton Road in Spencer, MA, serving 430 students as the larger of the two Spencer-E Brookfield schools covered in this data. It has held a 1-star state rating for ten consecutive reporting years, with its percentile ranking never rising above 27 and usually sitting in the low-to-mid teens (15th percentile in 2025-2026). The one brighter stretch — 27th percentile in 2016-2017 and 20th in 2017-2018 — faded within two years, so the record reads less as a school in decline than one that has been stuck.

Academically, proficiency runs at roughly half the state level: 24.29% in English language arts and 22.03% in math, against statewide figures near 40%. Math is the sharper of the two gaps (about 19 points below the state versus roughly 16 for ELA), and grade 3 math — 20.73% — is the weakest single measure the school reports. Resources do not appear to explain these results. Wire Village's 12.0-to-1 student-teacher ratio is more favorable than every Worcester comparison school nearby, and its $16,097 per-student spending is mid-pack. Paxton Center spends less per student and posts roughly double the math proficiency.

The most telling comparison is close to home: East Brookfield Elementary, in the same district about 3.7 miles away, scores 15 to 16 points higher in both subjects and ranks at the 47th percentile. Under a stable headline, subgroup results are also diverging. Female students moved from the 11th to the 25th percentile over three years while male students slipped from the 14th to the 8th; low-income students fell from the 22nd to the 8th, and students with disabilities have been volatile. Families should treat these subgroup figures with caution, since they rest on small numbers and can swing from year to year.