Taylor Middle

Taylor Middle is the only 7th–8th grade campus in Lovington Municipal Schools, serving 442 students at 700 South 11th St in Lovington, New Mexico, in a community where 100% of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch in 2024-25.

The school currently ranks 102nd of 191 ranked New Mexico middle schools — the 47th percentile, 2 stars. That is a recovery, not a peak: Taylor was a steady 3-star school through 2018-19, reaching the 69th percentile, then dropped to a 1-star, 27th-percentile low in 2023-24 before climbing back. The improvement shows up on the same test across three years: on NM-MSSA, English language arts moved from 31% (2023-24) to 44.68% (2024-25) to 43.69% (2025-26), and math from 11% to 19.15% to 25%. Over the same span, the student-teacher ratio improved from 19.9 to 13.4. The two trends line up, though the data cannot prove one caused the other.

Compared with Lovington 6th Grade Academy, a feeder campus half a mile away, reading is a wash (43.39 vs. 43.2) but math is a wide gap: Taylor's 7th and 8th graders combined posted 24.83% math proficiency against the Academy's 48.06%. The single clearest pattern is the 6th-to-7th grade math drop — one cohort tested at 43.44% math as 6th graders, then 29.96% a year later, while the same group's reading rose from 42.53% to 47.79%. Inside the building, 7th grade beats the state in both subjects while 8th grade falls below in both plus science (28.92% vs. 34.19%). Reported student groups, including low-income students (30th to 59th percentile), now rank above the school's own overall standing. The realistic picture: a state-average school serving a far-from-average population, still working on its 8th grade year and the middle-school math transition.