Best Public Schools in Winfall, NC

Winfall, North Carolina, is served by two public schools within the Perquimans County Schools district: Perquimans Central, an elementary school for grades PK–2 with 423 students, and Perquimans County Middle, serving grades 6–8 with 387 students, while no public high school exists in the town itself.

Both schools serve an almost universally economically disadvantaged population—about 99% of students at each school qualify for free/reduced lunch—yet the academic picture is not uniformly challenging. Perquimans County Middle is the only school with test data, and it stands out for beating the state average in reading at every grade level during the 2025–2026 school year, with 7th graders outperforming the state by more than 11 percentage points. Science proficiency also edged past the state average. However, math proficiency declines sharply by grade: from 67.7% in 6th grade to 50.0% in 8th grade, a 17.7-point drop worth monitoring. Student–teacher ratios near 14:1 at both schools likely support individualized attention and may help explain the middle school’s stronger-than-expected results despite high poverty. Perquimans Central has no EOG scores because it only serves PK–2, but it posts a notable attendance win: its chronic absenteeism rate is 22.0%, lower than the district’s 23.1% and the state’s 24.2%.

The biggest red flag in Winfall is chronic absenteeism at Perquimans County Middle, where 28.5% of students are chronically absent—6.5 points higher than Perquimans Central and several points above both district and state averages. This threatens to undermine the middle school’s academic momentum in reading and science. Meanwhile, because Winfall lacks a high school, families should plan for students to leave town for ninth grade elsewhere in Perquimans County. Overall, these schools prove that high economic need does not define outcomes: the middle school delivers real academic strengths, and the elementary school shows early attendance stability, making chronic absenteeism at the middle school the key issue to watch.