Summary:
The Carsonville-Port Sanilac School District is a small, rural Michigan district serving about 405 students in grades PK-12 across three schools: an elementary school, a high school, and an alternative learning center.
For parents, the standout is CarsonvillePort Sanilac High School, which consistently outperforms state averages in most subjects despite nearly 60% of its students qualifying for free/reduced lunch. It boasts a perfect 100% graduation rate and a 0% dropout rate, with particularly strong 11th-grade social studies (65% proficient vs. 43% statewide) and 8th-grade science scores. However, this success contrasts sharply with CarsonvillePort Sanilac Elementary School, which falls below state averages in every subject and grade level—for example, only 20% of 4th graders are proficient in ELA compared to 41% statewide. The CarsonvillePort Sanilac Learning Center, an alternative program, shows the most concerning outcomes with just a 50% graduation rate, a 20% dropout rate, and an 81.9% chronic absenteeism rate.
A key concern is the dramatic "middle school dip" at the high school, where 6th-grade ELA proficiency (60%) plummets to just 21% by 7th grade—a pattern that reverses the prior year's data, suggesting cohort volatility rather than a consistent trend. Additionally, the Learning Center's extremely high student-teacher ratio (112.7:1) and per-student spending of just $8,012—less than half of the other schools—raise questions about whether struggling students are being diverted there, potentially inflating the high school's perfect graduation rate. District-wide chronic absenteeism (37.2%) exceeds the state average, and while the high school shows strong reading scores, only 26.1% of 11th graders are proficient in SAT math, indicating a systemic math weakness. With small cohorts of 20-30 students per grade, families should evaluate multi-year trends rather than single-year results.
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