Summary:
Scappoose, Oregon has two middle-level schools, both in Scappoose School District 1J: Otto Petersen Elementary School, which serves grades 4–6 with 416 students, and Scappoose Middle School, which serves grades 7–8 with 307 students. Because their grade spans are contiguous and non-overlapping, the two campuses together form a single grades 4–8 middle-level continuum of 723 students. Note the naming quirk: Otto Petersen is called an elementary school but carries grades 4–6 and is classified as a middle school in this data.
Academically, both schools beat the state average in ELA, math, and science, though both trail their own district in every subject and at every grade level. Scappoose Middle posts the stronger overall results — ELA 49.2, math 37.5, science 40.0 — and is the only school with a ranking history, climbing from the 54th to the 69th to the 73rd percentile over three years and rising from 3 to 4 stars. Otto Petersen's results swing widely by grade: 4th grade is the weakest point in the data (ELA 29.9, math 24.6, both well below the state), while 6th grade is among the strongest (ELA 56.6, math 44.3). Scappoose Middle's pattern is flatter, dipping slightly from 7th to 8th grade. Science is the clearest shared strength, and math at the lower grades is the relative soft spot.
Day-to-day conditions differ too. The two schools have nearly identical free/reduced lunch rates (31.73% and 32.57%), but Scappoose Middle spends more per student ($18,533 versus $15,658) while running larger classes (20:1 versus 18.7:1). Chronic absenteeism is 24.0% at Otto Petersen — better than its district and the state — compared with 29.8% at Scappoose Middle, which is worse than its district but still better than the state. With only two schools, the most reliable comparisons are grade-level ones against state averages, and those are favorable nearly everywhere.
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