Summary:
Zip code 29170 in West Columbia, South Carolina is home to two high schools—Airport High, a large traditional public school serving grades 9-12 with 1,272 students, and Midlands Middle College, a small public charter school serving grades 10-12 with just 115 students.
For families choosing between these two very different models, the trade-offs are clear. Airport High offers the comprehensive experience of a large school and has shown strong recent academic improvement—its English 1 proficiency jumped from 48.61% to 72.13% in one year, and its English 2 scores (78.3%) are close to the state average. However, its graduation rate of 78.8% lags the state average of 86.7%, and it spends significantly more at $14,078 per student. In contrast, Midlands Middle College achieves a much higher graduation rate of 88.9% while spending 32% less per student ($9,542), and it actually outperforms Airport High in U.S. History proficiency (54.84% vs. 42.1%). Yet the charter school has a dropout rate of 11.3%—nearly three times the state average—and its state ranking has declined from 115th to 175th over the past decade.
Both schools share a critical weakness: chronic absenteeism exceeds 32% at each, well above the state average of 22.3%, suggesting community-wide engagement challenges. Airport High sits in the Lexington 02 district (ranked 53rd of 75 districts), while Midlands Middle College belongs to the School Public Charter School District (ranked 32nd). Parents should weigh Airport High's improving academics and broader offerings against Midlands Middle College's higher graduation rate and cost efficiency—while keeping in mind the charter's higher dropout rate and the fact that neither school has solved the absenteeism problem affecting this area.
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