Watertown School District 14-4

The eight schools in Watertown School District 14-4 serve 3,606 students, from early childhood through high school, across five elementary, two middle, and one high school. The clearest overall pattern is that math results are stronger than the state average, while ELA is close to the state overall but varies much more from school to school: the five schools with reported results averaged 57% in math versus 44% statewide, while ELA averaged about 49% in both the district group and the state, with school results spanning 36% to 60%.

Watertown Middle School - 02 leads reported all-grades ELA at 60%, about 4 points ahead of Watertown Intermediate School - 13 at 55%. Mellette Elementary - 07 is lowest in all-grades ELA at 36%, 13 points below the state; its grade 3 ELA result is 20%, compared with 57% at Jefferson Elementary - 09. Math is more consistently above the state: Jefferson leads at 60.5%, just 0.2 points above Lincoln Elementary - 05, and even Intermediate, the lowest of the five, is 5 points above the state. Watertown High School - 01 also exceeds state results in all three reported ACT subjects, by about 4 to 6 points.

Over the two available years, the five-school math average rose about 6 points while the state was nearly unchanged; ELA fell about 1 point, but the state fell about 2. Lincoln gained 4 points in all-grades ELA and 7 in math, while Watertown Middle and Intermediate each lost about 3 ELA points. As context, Mellette had the highest reported free/reduced lunch eligible share in 2024–2025, 48%, yet its math result was 13 points above the state; this measure does not explain school results. SchoolDigger gives the district 3 stars and a rank of 46 out of 126; Watertown Middle is at the 75th percentile with 4 stars, while Sunrise Colony’s only listed ranking is the 8th percentile with 0 stars in 2024–2025.