Summary:
Forest Municipal School District is served by one middle school, Hawkins Middle School, which enrolls 460 students in grades 5 through 8. As the district's only middle school, Hawkins Middle directly shapes the district's middle-level reputation, and the district overall ranks 108th out of 134 Mississippi districts, placing it in the 19th percentile with a 1-star rating.
Hawkins Middle School ranks in the bottom 10% of Mississippi middle schools, earning a 0-star rating in 2025–2026 after slipping from the 16th percentile in 2023–2024 to the 8th percentile most recently. The school serves a high-poverty population, with 83.91% of students eligible for free/reduced lunch. Academic proficiency trails state averages across every subject: ELA proficiency is 24.0% versus 45.6% statewide, math is 29.7% versus 52.9%, and science is 45.0% versus 64.7%. The largest gaps appear in 8th grade math, where only 19.4% of students are proficient compared to 51.4% statewide, and 5th grade science, where 39.9% are proficient versus 71.5% statewide.
Despite these challenges, Hawkins Middle School has some relative strengths. Eighth-grade science proficiency reached 50.0%, just 7.8 points below the state average, and improved by 7.7 points over the prior year. Chronic absenteeism is 20.2%, lower than both the district average of 24.6% and the state average of 23.9%, despite the school's high poverty rate. The student-teacher ratio of 13.7 is also favorable. However, proficiency declines as students advance: 5th grade ELA proficiency of 34.4% falls to 21.4% by 8th grade, and math drops from 36.8% to 19.4%, indicating growing academic gaps in the middle grades.
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