Summary:
Manning, South Carolina is home to a single middle school, Manning Junior High, which serves grades 6-8 and enrolls 483 students within the Clarendon 06 school district.
For parents considering this school, the most pressing concern is chronic absenteeism. With 35.3% of students chronically absent—compared to 29.4% for the district and 22.3% statewide—this is a crisis-level metric that likely undermines academic progress across all subjects. Academically, the school consistently ranks in the bottom third of South Carolina middle schools, earning just 1-2 stars in recent years. Mathematics is the weakest area, with 7th grade math proficiency plummeting to just 15.2% in 2025-2026, a staggering 26.6 points below the state average. However, there are bright spots: 8th grade math surged by 14.6 points to 38.3% proficiency, actually exceeding the district average, and 6th grade ELA improved dramatically by 12.2 points to 50.6%, nearly closing the gap with the state. English Language Arts is a relative strength overall, with scores within 5-7 points of state averages in most grades.
The school shows highly inconsistent performance across grade levels, suggesting that outcomes depend heavily on specific teachers or cohorts rather than school-wide systems. For example, 7th grade math proficiency is less than half of 8th grade math proficiency. Per-student spending is robust at $14,200, and the student-teacher ratio of 16.6:1 is slightly above the national average. The Clarendon 06 district itself ranks in the bottom third of South Carolina districts, indicating these challenges are systemic rather than unique to this school. For parents, the key takeaway is that while the school faces significant hurdles—particularly in math and attendance—there are pockets of improvement worth investigating, especially the 8th grade math success, which could serve as a model for replication.
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