Summary:
ZIP code 44428 contains just one middle school: Badger Middle School, a grades 5–8 building with 168 students in Kinsman, part of the Joseph Badger Local district. With no other middle schools in the ZIP to compare against, the useful benchmarks are the district and the state of Ohio. The school has held a 3-star rating for three consecutive years, ranking 430 of 1,046 schools (59th percentile) in 2025-26, down from the 67th percentile in 2023-24. Its district ranks 294 of 773 (62nd percentile), also 3 stars.
Badger Middle's strongest signal is math acceleration. Its Algebra I end-of-course results reached 94.4% proficient in 2025-26, far above the state's 61.6% and more than 40 points above its own district's 52.3%; the prior year it posted 85.0% against a 59.4% state figure. English language arts is the school's most dependable subject, averaging 66.2% across grades 5–8 versus 61.9% statewide, with 5th-grade ELA hitting 90% in 2024-25 (state: 67.7%). Overall, the school beats the state in 9 of 11 tested areas in both years — 63.8% vs. 59.0% on a simple average in 2025-26 and 66.6% vs. 57.4% in 2024-25. Chronic absenteeism of 16.6% is also better than the district's 19.6%.
The clear weak spot is 8th-grade mathematics, the lowest score in the entire record in both years: 31.3% proficient in 2025-26 against a 52.0% state average, and 19.4% against 47.6% the year before. Set against Algebra I's 94.4%, that is a 63.1-point spread within one building, pointing to a small, high-performing accelerated group alongside a general 8th-grade math population where roughly two-thirds are not proficient. The same cohort fell from 69.7% as 7th graders to 31.3% as 8th graders. Two gaps remain: the free/reduced-lunch rate is not reported, so economic context is unknown, and the only spending figure ($10,060) dates to 2018-19.
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