Paisley Magnet School

Paisley Magnet School is a public magnet school in Winston-Salem, NC, serving 553 students in grades 6 through 10 as part of Winston Salem / Forsyth County Schools. Paisley serves a student body where 99.5% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the school has a relatively low student-teacher ratio of about 13 to 1. Its most recent state accountability rating, however, places it at the 8th percentile among North Carolina middle schools with a 0-star rating — a sharp decline from a few years ago, when the school earned 2 stars and ranked closer to the 40th percentile.

Two very different academic pictures emerge from Paisley’s test scores. On middle-grade End-of-Grade tests in math and reading, students score far below district and state averages. Only about 14% of 8th graders were proficient in math in the latest testing year — the lowest rate among nearby middle schools. Yet on high school-level End-of-Course exams, Paisley’s results are remarkably strong: 91.7% of students were proficient in Biology and 95.0% in English II, well above district and state averages. This split suggests a school where some students are doing very well in advanced courses while many others in the middle grades are not yet on track. Chronic absenteeism is another major concern, with 40% of students missing enough school to be considered chronically absent — roughly double the rate found at the area’s highest-performing schools.

Compared with other Winston-Salem/Forsyth middle schools, Paisley is currently one of the lowest-ranked options. Nearby magnets Hanes Magnet School and Wiley Magnet Middle both enroll similarly high-poverty populations but are ranked at the 46th and 26th percentiles, respectively. At the top of the local range, Thomas Jefferson Middle and Meadowlark Middle rank near the 80th percentile, with far lower chronic absenteeism. Paisley is instead grouped with East Forsyth Middle School and Northwest Middle, which also sit near the 8th percentile. For parents, the bottom line is that Paisley is not simply a low-performing school — it is a school with deep contrasts between subjects, grade levels, and student groups. The most urgent areas to watch are attendance, the middle-grade math and reading slide, and large gaps in outcomes between different groups of students.