Bertie Middle

Bertie Middle is a rural eastern North Carolina middle school in Windsor serving 354 students in grades 6–8 as part of Bertie County Schools, a district ranked 166th out of 246 North Carolina districts. The school's own statewide ranking has climbed steadily from the 15th percentile in 2021–22 to the 32nd percentile in 2025–26, when it ranked 531st out of 778 middle schools and earned a 2-star rating.

Nearly all Bertie Middle students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, so the school serves a high-poverty community — yet its results tell a more nuanced story than its overall ranking suggests. In the most recent testing year, 63% of 6th graders were proficient in math, above the state average, and 7th-grade reading was close to the state average. Performance then drops sharply by 8th grade: only 25.7% of 8th graders were proficient in math and 30.5% in reading, versus 53.0% and 56.1% statewide. This pattern is especially visible when comparing Bertie Middle to Riverside Middle, a similar rural school about 17 miles away in Williamston. Both schools have nearly identical poverty rates and similar per-pupil spending, yet Riverside's 8th-grade math proficiency was 59.6% — a 34-point gap — and its chronic absenteeism rate was 22.8% versus Bertie's 35.8%.

There are also genuine bright spots. African American students, students receiving special education services, and low-income students at Bertie Middle all rank well above the school's overall percentile compared with their peers statewide, and those rankings have improved dramatically in recent years — special education students, for example, jumped from the 8th percentile in 2023–24 to the 58th percentile in 2025–26. Because Bertie Middle is essentially the county's only middle school, its progress defines the Bertie County Schools district results. The clearest opportunities going forward are reducing chronic absenteeism and strengthening academic supports for the transition into 8th grade.