Northwest Middle School

Northwest Junior High School is a public middle school in Meridian, Mississippi, serving 518 students in grades 6-8. The school is part of the Meridian Public Schools district, which is ranked 122 out of 130 districts in the state and has a 0-star rating from SchoolDigger.

Northwest Junior High School faces significant challenges, with consistently high chronic absenteeism rates ranging from 23.9% to 32.9% over the past few years, well above the state average for middle schools. Academically, the school's performance, as measured by the percentage of students proficient or better on the MAAP tests, is consistently lower than the state and district averages across all grade levels and subject areas. For example, in the 2024-2025 school year, the school's proficiency rates in English Language Arts (ELA) ranged from 25.6% to 31.5%, compared to the state averages of 37.3% to 46.7%. In mathematics, the school's proficiency rates ranged from 24.6% to 27.3%, compared to the state averages of 47.5% to 52.9%. The school's performance in science is also below the state average, with 8th-grade proficiency rates ranging from 41.2% to 43.3%, compared to the state average of 54.7% to 59.1%.

Interestingly, the nearby Magnolia Middle School, which is also part of the Meridian Public Schools district, has similar academic performance and chronic absenteeism rates to Northwest Junior High School. In contrast, the schools in the Enterprise School District and Lauderdale County School District, which are outside the Meridian Public Schools district, consistently outperform Northwest Junior High School and the Meridian Public Schools district as a whole on academic measures, with many grades exceeding 50% proficiency.