Best Public Schools in Mays Landing, NJ

Mays Landing has seven listed schools: three elementary, one middle and three high schools, serving students from pre-K through high school; this includes Joseph C Shaner Memorial Elementary School for pre-K through kindergarten and two schools with specialized programs. Four schools report test results, while the other three cannot be compared academically from the supplied results. The most important difference is between the two high schools with comparable results: Atlantic County Institute of Technology outperformed Oakcrest High School by 19 to 26 percentage points on all six shared measures.

ACIT stands out at the top of that high-school comparison, scoring above the state in five of its six shared tests; Oakcrest was below the state in all six, by 14 to 32 points. For example, ACIT had 83% proficiency on 11th-grade NJGPA ELA versus Oakcrest’s 58%, while on ninth-grade ELA the results were 52% and 32%. William Davies Middle School has a notable subject-specific strength: eighth-grade Algebra I proficiency was 80%, 6 points above the state, even as regular eighth-grade math was 28%. George L. Hess Educational Complex was below the state in every reported test; its fifth-grade science proficiency was 6%, 21 points below the state. Hess’s results are from different grades than Davies’s, so they are not a direct school-to-school ranking.

Results against the state generally improved over time, though not everywhere: the school-state gap narrowed in 18 of 27 matched comparisons from 2024–25 to 2025–26, with an average improvement of 2 points. SchoolDigger’s rankings also moved in different directions: Davies rose from the 28th to the 38th percentile, while Oakcrest fell from the 21st to the 15th; Hess moved from the 21st to the 20th, and ACIT from the 54th to the 57th. The reported 2024–25 free/reduced lunch eligible shares were fairly close—60% at Davies, 62% at Hess, 63% at ACIT and 66% at Oakcrest—and are context, not an explanation for results. Graduation rates were above state at ACIT and Oakcrest, at 96% and 92%, but chronic absenteeism was also higher than state at all four tested schools, ranging from 20% to 26% versus 14% statewide.