Summary:
Bath, North Carolina is served by a single public school, Bath Elementary, a K-8 school with 511 students that belongs to Beaufort County Schools (which ranks 95th of 246 North Carolina districts). Because Bath Elementary is the only school in the city, there are no direct school-to-school comparisons to make; instead, the most useful context comes from comparing the school to its district and state averages. Bath Elementary is a high-poverty school, with 99.41% of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, yet it consistently ranks among the top schools in the state, earning 4-5 stars in recent years.
Academically, Bath Elementary outperforms both its district and the state of North Carolina by wide margins. In the 2025-2026 school year, average math proficiency across grades 3-8 was 81.7%, compared to 59.9% statewide; reading came in at 68.3% versus 56.0% statewide; and science reached 80.5% versus 68.2% statewide. The school's greatest strength is early-grade math, with 97.2% of 3rd graders and 92.5% of 4th graders proficient. Science is also a bright spot in the upper grades, with 85.1% of 8th graders proficient versus 68.6% statewide.
Still, there are areas to monitor. Proficiency tends to decline as grade levels rise, with 8th-grade reading (59.7%) barely above the state average and 5th-grade reading (62.3%) representing a notable drop from earlier grades. Year-over-year results have also been mixed: 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade science improved, while 3rd-grade reading and 5th-grade science dipped. The school's chronic absenteeism rate of 21.1%, while lower than the district's 26.9% and the state's 24.2%, still means roughly one in five students is chronically absent. Bath Elementary slipped from the 93rd to the 89th percentile in statewide rankings over the past year, but it remains an exceptional high-poverty, high-performing school.
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