Summary:
Dayton School District in Dayton, Washington, has one middle school serving grades 6–8: Dayton Middle School, which enrolls 93 students. The school serves a small community and has a student–teacher ratio of 18.1 to 1. About 49.46% of students participated in the free or reduced-price lunch program in 2024–25, and reported per-student spending was $18,932 in 2023–24. Because there is only one middle school in the Dayton School District, families cannot compare it with another local middle school.
Dayton Middle School has a mixed academic profile. Science is the strongest area: 47.06% of students were proficient in 2025–26, just 3.89 percentage points below the Washington average, and 8th-grade science was only 1.72 points below the state. English language arts proficiency was 36.11%, up 5.85 points from the previous year, but still below both the district and state. Mathematics is the main challenge, with only 20.83% proficiency—22.28 points below the state—and just a 1.09-point improvement year over year. Grade-level results show meaningful variation: 7th-grade ELA was strongest at 42.86%, while 8th-grade ELA was weakest at 23.53%. The 8th-grade math result was suppressed, so it cannot be interpreted as zero or as a specific performance level.
The school’s ranking improved from the 14th percentile in 2024–25 to the 28th percentile in 2025–26, although it remained rated one star and below its 55th-percentile standing in 2023–24. The recent gains in science and ELA are encouraging, but families should expect the greatest need for improvement in math and 8th-grade reading and writing. The small enrollment means that a relatively small number of students can noticeably change annual percentages, so multi-year trends are more useful than any single result. Parents may also want to ask about math intervention, 8th-grade ELA support, and the instructional practices that helped science performance improve.
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