Marinette School District

Marinette School District serves about 1,914 students across four schools — two elementary schools (Marinette Primary for PK–1 and Marinette Intermediate for grades 2–4), one middle school (Marinette Middle, grades 5–8), and one high school (Marinette High, grades 9–12) — in a small Wisconsin community. The district overall is rated 1 star and ranks 382 of 432 Wisconsin districts (12th percentile), a low overall rating that masks real differences among its individual schools.

Marinette Intermediate is the district's bright spot: the only 2-star school, ranked 645 of 1,039 (38th percentile), with the lowest chronic absenteeism at 15.0% — below both the district (22.9%) and the state (17.3%). Its test scores are closest to state averages, about −4.0 percentage points, and 4th grade Social Studies (69.35% vs. 65.51%) is above state — even though it has the district's highest free/reduced-lunch rate at 52.69%. Marinette Middle is the most urgent concern, with the highest chronic absenteeism (32.7%) and dropout rate (3.8%) and the largest average test gap at about −15.7 points below state, especially in grades 6 and 8. Marinette High is improving, rising from the 7th to the 27th percentile in three years, with a graduation rate of 89.3%, but ACT Math (21.97% vs. 42.93%) and ELA (31.82% vs. 48.47%) remain far below state.

Marinette Primary faces resource pressures: the highest student-teacher ratio at 20.8, the lowest per-student spending at $12,991, a free/reduced-lunch rate of 52.05%, and 20.0% chronic absenteeism. It has no recent test or rank data, so current academics are hard to judge. Notably, spending and class size don't line up simply with results — the high school spends the most per student ($15,201) yet has large ACT gaps, while Intermediate spends less and performs best.