Summary:
ZIP code 02143 in Somerville, Massachusetts contains exactly one middle school: Next Wave Junior High, located at 81 Highland Ave. It serves grades 6–8 and is part of the Somerville district. With only 16 students enrolled, it is an exceptionally small school — a profile that shapes everything else in its data.
Test results at Next Wave Junior High are far below both district and state averages. In 2025–2026, 9.09% of students reached proficiency in English Language Arts and 9.09% in Math, compared with roughly 39.52% and 36.69% in Somerville and about 40.03% and 41.11% statewide. In 2024–2025 the school reported 7.14% in ELA and 0% in Math. Historically it ranked at or near the very bottom of the state: 482 of 482 in 2015–2016, 432 of 441 in 2014–2015, and 450 of 455 in 2011–2012. Because only 16 students are enrolled, these percentages are fragile — a single student's result can shift the rate by many points — so year-to-year changes should be read with caution.
The school is also unusually small and heavily staffed. Its student-teacher ratio is 3.1 in 2024–2025, and per-student spending was $58,190 in 2020–2021, both signs of an intensive, high-resource setting rather than a typical comprehensive middle school. The district overall ranks 198 of 351 (44th percentile, 2 stars), but that rating applies to Somerville as a whole, not to this school specifically. Free/reduced lunch information is not reported, and no current school-level rank or demographic breakdown is available, so parents cannot tell from this data why proficiency is low or how the school's students compare with those at other schools.
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