Bragg Street Academy

Located in Sanford, NC, Bragg Street Academy is a very small, specialized 6–12 school within Lee County Schools — just 40 students, about 90% of them from low-income families — and it has ranked in the bottom 1% of North Carolina’s high schools for many consecutive years.

On recent state tests, just 8.3% of Bragg Street Academy’s students scored proficient on English II — far below the roughly 40% at Southern Lee High School and Lee County High, the 98.2% at Lee Early College, and the 64.6% statewide. Its 56.6% graduation rate likewise trails nearly every neighboring high school, such as Union Pines High (91.5%) and Ascend Leadership Academy: Lee County (92.4%). Poverty alone does not explain this gap: the school’s 90% low-income rate is actually lower than the 98–99% levels at the district’s other public high schools. The school instead functions as an intervention academy for students who have fallen far behind academically or credit-wise and need an exceptionally small setting to recover.

The most pressing barrier is attendance: 73.8% of students were chronically absent in 2024–25, meaning about three of every four students missed a significant portion of the year. The only similar nearby figure is The Community Learning Center @ Pinckney at 74.4%, another small 6–12 program serving high-need students. The school spends about $20,800 per student — more than twice the per-student spending at nearby large high schools — and maintains a student-teacher ratio near 6 to 1. That staffing intensity has not yet produced strong test results, likely because regular attendance must come first. There is genuine progress, however: graduation rates have risen from 35.7% in 2021–22 to the upper 50s now, a meaningful improvement for students with substantial challenges.