Summary:
ZIP code 01983 — Topsfield, Massachusetts — is served by a single middle school, Proctor Elementary, a grades 4–6 school with 251 students in the Topsfield district. Despite the "Elementary" name, it is classified as a middle school and functions as an upper-elementary/intermediate school rather than a traditional grades 6–8 middle school. With only one school in the ZIP, all comparisons below are against the state (and, where noted, the district) — there are no local peer schools to weigh it against.
Proctor outperformed the Massachusetts proficiency rate in every reported comparison in the file — all 13 subject, grade, and year combinations. Statewide, about 40% of students met expectations in each subject; at Proctor, 54.13% were proficient in English language arts (state: 40.03%), 51.63% in math (state: 41.11%), and 55.84% in science (state: 40.98%). Its widest margin is 6th grade ELA, at 66.27% proficient versus the state's 40.26% — more than 1.6 times the state rate. Fourth grade math is also a strong point (58.14% versus 43.20%). Its narrowest edges are 6th grade math (+4.40 points) and 5th grade ELA (+5.09 points), which is the school's lowest ELA result at 43.24%.
Two things are worth knowing before reading too much into the numbers. Science is tested only in 5th grade, so the school's "all grades" science figure is really one grade's result — and the drop from 72.62% to 55.84% since last year compares two different groups of students, not the same children declining. ELA, math, and science all narrowed their margins over the state this year while remaining comfortably above it. The school is small and comparatively well-resourced, with 10.4 students per teacher (roughly 24 teachers) and per-pupil spending of $18,943, though that spending figure is from 2020–2021. The free/reduced-lunch field is blank, so the file offers no economic context for interpreting these scores.
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