Elizabethtown Middle

Elizabethtown Middle is a 305-student school serving grades 5–8 in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, within Bladen County Schools, where 95.4% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Elizabethtown Middle is among the lowest-performing middle schools in North Carolina, ranking 706th of 778 schools in the most recent state rankings — the 9th percentile, with a 0-star rating. It has spent most of the past decade in the bottom quarter of the state. Nearby Clarkton School of Discovery shows this is not inevitable: it serves the same grades in the same district yet ranked at the 36th percentile statewide. Littlefield Middle ranked at the 48th percentile, while Bladenboro Middle was close behind Elizabethtown at the 10th percentile.

Academically, proficiency rates trail state and district averages in nearly every subject and grade. In 6th-grade math, just 33.7% of students were proficient, compared with 73.1% at Clarkton and 53.1% at Littlefield. Chronic absenteeism is the most pressing concern: 39.2% of students were chronically absent in 2024-2025 — worse than every nearby school and far above the state average of 24.2% — and the rate has climbed every year since 2021-2022. There are a few bright spots, including 7th-grade reading, where 38.7% proficiency slightly beats the district average.

Some student groups do comparatively well. Special education outcomes ranked at the 54th percentile statewide, and English learner results have improved from the 9th percentile in 2021-2022 to the 37th percentile by 2024-2025. The school has also shown recent gains: 7th-grade math proficiency jumped from 11.4% to 29.3%, and 8th-grade science rose from 36.1% to 48.4% between 2024-2025 and 2025-2026. These improvements are real, but most students still remain below grade level. Since Elizabethtown Middle spends more per student ($10,947) than nearby middle schools and has a favorable student-teacher ratio of 15.1, the keys to improvement likely lie in attendance and instruction rather than resources.