Best Public Schools in Zip Code 44857

ZIP code 44857 is served by the Norwalk City district and includes six schools—three elementary, two middle, and one high school—with no alternative schools, and listed enrollment totaling 2,453 students across overlapping grade spans such as PK–1, 2–3, 3–5, 5–6, 7–9, and 9–12. The district profile is rank 331 of 773, 57th percentile, 3 stars, and all six schools share that district-level rating. The strongest current school-level standout is Main Street School, the only 4-star school here, ranked 453 of 1,560 and 71st percentile for 2025–26. Pleasant Elementary School also performs well relative to the state: 3rd-grade math is 88.9% proficient versus Ohio’s 62.1%, and 3rd-grade ELA is 81.3% versus 63.4%.

Norwalk Middle School posts 100% proficiency in Algebra I in both 2024–25 and 2025–26, far above the district’s 72.8% and the state’s 61.6%, though this likely reflects a small advanced cohort. Norwalk High School has a 93.4% graduation rate and above-state results in American Government (79.6% vs. 71.6%) and American History (75.3% vs. 73.2%), but its current rank is 2 stars, 45th percentile, and Geometry (41.7%) and Biology (63.8%) are below state averages. League Elementary School is the smallest school at 192 students and has the highest 2018–19 per-student spending at $10,383, while its 2025–26 6th-grade math (55.7%) and ELA (51.1%) are near or slightly below state. Maplehurst Elementary School serves PK–1, so it has no state test scores in this data set.

Chronic absenteeism ranges from 9.8% at Pleasant to 26.8% at Norwalk Middle, with Norwalk High at 22.8% and Maplehurst at 20.9%, all above the district rate of 18.4%; Main Street (11.7%) and League (15.4%) are below it. Student-teacher ratios range from 11.8 at Norwalk Middle to 21.4 at Norwalk High, while elementary ratios are tightly clustered around 18.7 to 19.2. Spending and outcomes do not line up neatly: Main Street has the second-lowest 2018–19 spending at $7,107 but strong outcomes, while League has the highest spending but weaker 6th-grade results. Note that free/reduced lunch data is blank, spending is historical from 2018–19, and overlapping grades mean enrollment totals are listed school counts rather than an unduplicated student count.