Bear River Middle

Bear River Middle in Garland, Utah, serves grades 8–10 and enrolls 841 students in the Box Elder District, a rural-area district ranked 50th of 92 Utah districts in the supplied data. The school has a similar economic profile to nearby Box Elder Middle, with about 30.3% of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch compared with 31.0% at the comparison school.

Academically, Bear River’s 2025–26 results were below both district averages and Box Elder Middle in every reported subject and grade. The largest difference was in eighth-grade mathematics, where 36.3% of Bear River students were proficient compared with 58.3% at Box Elder Middle. Ninth-grade results were especially concerning: proficiency was 31.0% in ELA, 31.2% in mathematics, and 35.8% in science. Eighth-grade science stands out as a relative strength at 51.0%, slightly above Utah’s 50.8% rate and improved from 47.2% the prior year. Because Bear River serves grade 10 while Box Elder Middle serves grades 8–9, comparisons—especially for ninth grade—are not perfectly equivalent.

Attendance is a notable strength compared with the nearby school. Bear River’s chronic absenteeism rate was 29.3% in 2024–25, well below Box Elder Middle’s 48.1% and the district’s 32.0%, although it remained above Utah’s 23.8% and rose from 22.5% in 2022–23. Staffing also became somewhat less favorable, with the student-teacher ratio increasing from 20.2 to 21.2. Overall, the data suggests targeted priorities rather than uniform weakness: preserve the school’s attendance advantage while focusing additional support on eighth-grade mathematics, ninth-grade mathematics, and ninth-grade ELA and science.