Best Elementary Schools in Zip Code 27563

There is one elementary school in zip code 27563—Northside Elementary—serving pre-kindergarten through fifth grade in Norlina, North Carolina, part of Warren County Schools. Serving 277 students, the school faces significant community-wide challenges: nearly all students (98.92%) qualify for free/reduced-price lunch, and chronic absenteeism runs at 47.4%, roughly double the state rate of 24.2%. Given these conditions, the school’s academic performance is best understood as a story of recent momentum rather than current ranking alone.

Northside has shown dramatic improvement over the last two years, jumping from the 3rd percentile of North Carolina elementary schools in 2023–2024 to the 23rd percentile in 2025–2026. The most striking gains came in 4th grade, where Reading proficiency more than doubled from 31.0% to 61.4%—now above the state average of 57.7%—and Mathematics rose from 31.0% to 56.8%, coming close to the state’s 61.4%. Even when compared with its low-performing district, Northside outperformed Warren County Schools in 4th grade Math and Reading as well as in 3rd and 5th grade Reading. These broad-based improvements across multiple grades and subjects suggest real instructional progress, not random variation.

Still, significant gaps remain. Fifth grade Science is the biggest concern, with only 31.4% proficiency versus 67.7% statewide, a gap of over 36 percentage points. Most other grade-level scores in Math and Reading remain 10 to 30 points below state averages, and chronic absenteeism—affecting nearly half of students—poses a serious barrier to sustaining the recent gains. Northside is clearly on an upward path, and its 4th grade results prove that students can reach state-level proficiency despite high poverty. The next step is replicating that success in other grades and subjects while continuing to address attendance.