Summary:
ZIP code 01331 is home to a single public high school, Athol High, which serves grades 9–12 with 417 students in the town of Athol, Massachusetts, as part of the Athol-Royalston district. Because it is the only high school in the area, parents have no local public alternative to compare it against, so the most useful benchmarks are the school's own year-over-year trend, its district, and statewide averages.
The encouraging news is that Athol High is improving from a low starting point. Its statewide rank percentile climbed from 11 in 2023–2024 to 13 in 2024–2025 and then to 27 in 2025–2026, when it placed 259 out of 353 ranked schools and earned 1 star. Tenth-grade MCAS proficiency rose across all three core subjects: English Language Arts went from 25.32% to 36.05%, Mathematics from 20.55% to 31.03%, and Science from 20.9% to 26.83%. The school also edges out its own district in nearly every reported measure — for example, a graduation rate of 83.1% versus the district's 81.7% — though its dropout rate of 10.2% is marginally above the district's 10.0%, and the Athol-Royalston district itself ranks 316 of 351, in the 10th percentile with 1 star.
The clearest concern is science end-of-course performance. In 2025–2026, Biology proficiency was 12% and Physics 8.33%, compared with state averages of 37.68% and 46.58% — gaps of roughly 26 and 38 percentage points. In the core 10th-grade subjects, the school still trails the state by about 9 to 14 points. Resource figures look favorable on paper — a student-teacher ratio of 11.5 and per-student spending of $17,358 in 2020–2021 — but that spending figure is several years old, and the free/reduced lunch percentage is unavailable in this record, limiting socioeconomic context.
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