Summary:
ZIP code 01082 covers Ware, Massachusetts, and contains exactly one middle-level school: Ware Middle School, at 239 West Street and part of the Ware district. It enrolls 261 students in grades 4 through 6 — an unusual span for a school labeled "middle," since it includes two elementary grades — with a 2024–2025 student/teacher ratio of 14.3, or roughly 87 students per grade. Because it is the only school of its kind in the zip, there is no second local option to compare it with; the more useful comparisons are against its district, the state, and its own prior year.
On the 2025–2026 MCAS Next Generation tests, results were below the state in every subject: 19.17% proficient in English language arts (ELA) versus 40.03% statewide, 24.69% in math versus 41.11%, and 28.77% in science versus 40.98%. Science is the school's relative strength and ELA its weakest area. At the grade level, the brightest spot is grade-5 math at 31.51%, roughly 10 points above the school's own grade-4 (21.79%) and grade-6 (21.59%) math results; the weakest is grade-6 ELA at 15.91%, 24.35 points below the state figure for that grade. Math is the one subject where the school consistently beats its own district, by 8.17 points in 2024–2025 and 4.61 points in 2025–2026.
The sharpest signal in the data is a decline across all three subjects from 2024–2025 to 2025–2026 — ELA fell 5.63 points, math 6.64 points, and science 11.00 points — while state results held essentially flat. In 2024–2025 science the school came within 1.74 points of state parity, its closest approach in either year. Two gaps in context limit what can be concluded: the only per-student spending figure is $15,973 from 2020–2021, five years older than the test data, and no free/reduced-price lunch figure was reported for 2024–2025.
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