Summary
Apex Friendship Middle is a large public school in Apex, NC, serving 1,412 students in grades 6-8 as part of Wake County Schools, a highly rated district, and is one of North Carolina's very top middle schools. It currently ranks 18th out of 778 North Carolina middle schools for the 2025-2026 school year, placing it in the 98th percentile with a five-star rating. This is no one-year fluke: since 2018-2019, the school has ranked between 12th and 36th statewide, never slipping outside the top five percent. It's a particularly impressive feat given the school's large enrollment; sustaining elite results at this scale is challenging.
Academically, the school dominates the state's benchmarks. Math proficiency runs from 89.7% to 94.5% across grades, reading from 84.9% to 88.4%, and 8th-grade science comes in at 95.1%, exceeding district proficiency by roughly 19 to 26 percentage points and state proficiency by 27 to 37. Among nearby middle schools, only Mills Park Middle ranks higher statewide, at 8th. Davis Drive Middle is the closest peer at 23rd, followed by Holly Grove Middle (46th), Salem Middle (61st), and Apex Middle (147th). While math stands out as the school's strongest subject, reading and science are excellent too.
The school's success is also broad-based and consistent. Chronic absenteeism is just 10.0%, about half of the district's 20.5% rate and far better than the 24.2% statewide figure, and it has improved steadily in recent years. Subgroup results are unusually strong: Apex Friendship Middle ranks in the 99th percentile statewide for special education students and Hispanic students, and in the 97th percentile for low-income students, whose standing jumped from 88th to 20th statewide in one year. The school achieves all of this despite having the highest student-teacher ratio among its neighbors (19.3) and unremarkable per-pupil spending, a sign of instructional efficiency. The only relative soft spot is the gifted and talented subgroup, ranked in the 86th percentile, which families of advanced learners may want to explore. Overall, this is a school where students perform at remarkably high levels, year after year.
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