Summary:
ZIP code 56721 in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, is home to exactly one middle-level school — Central Middle — which serves grades 6–8, enrolls 463 students, and belongs to East Grand Forks Public Schools.
Because Central Middle is the only middle school in the ZIP, there are no local peers to compare it against; the meaningful comparisons are against its district, the state, and its own past performance. Its strengths are Math and Reading. In 2025–2026, all-grade Math proficiency was 45.7% versus the state's 44.9%, and Reading was 51.7% versus 48.6%. The prior year was stronger still: Math 48.53% vs. 45.21% and Reading 54.67% vs. 49.59%. At the grade level in 2025–2026, the school beat the state in every 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Math and Reading row. It has also earned 4 stars in each of the three reported years (2023–2024, 2024–2025, 2025–2026), compared with the district's 3 stars and 52nd-percentile ranking (219th of 458).
Science is the clear weak spot. In 2025–2026, 8th grade Science was 11.5% against a state figure of 16.7%, and all-grade Science was 11.5% vs. 25.5%; in 2024–2025 it was 17.99% vs. 26.15%. All three subjects also declined year over year — Math by 2.83 percentage points, Reading by 2.97, and Science by 6.49 — while state declines were far smaller. The school's rank percentile slipped from 81 to 79 to 71 across the three years. It remains a 4-star, above-average school, but the momentum is negative. For context, 2024–2025 free/reduced lunch was 29.16% and the student-teacher ratio 20.5; no benchmarks were supplied for these, so they are background rather than evidence of strength or weakness.
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