Birchwood Steam and Career Academy

Birchwood Steam and Career Academy is a grades 6–12 school in Birchwood, WI, part of the Birchwood School District, sharing an address with Birchwood High; its reported enrollment is 0, and no free/reduced-lunch or student-teacher-ratio data are available, so families should treat its percentages with extra caution because even a few students can shift results dramatically.

On the 2025–2026 8th-grade Forward Exam, the academy’s strongest results are in Social Studies (83.33) and Science (66.67), which are 18.70 and 14.81 points above the state, and 21.79 and 20.52 points above its district. Mathematics is the clear weak spot: 33.33 is 20.34 points below the state, and English Language Arts is 50, or 4.38 points below the state. Both still beat the district average. Compared with Shell Lake Junior/Senior High, the only nearby school with 8th-grade results shown, the academy trails sharply in ELA (50 vs. 76.09) and Math (33.33 vs. 73.91) but leads in Social Studies (83.33 vs. 69.57) and Science (66.67 vs. 54.35), a distinctive reversed profile. Its math score is also lower than every nearby math score in the data.

Meanwhile, the same-district Birchwood High is a different story: the 9–12 school has 59 students and ranked 44th of 533 Wisconsin high schools (92nd percentile, 5 stars) in 2025–2026, with 10th-grade results above state averages in Social Studies, ELA, Math, and Science. It spends $30,363 per student and has a 6.6 student-teacher ratio, the lowest among comparison schools. Its chronic absenteeism (12.5%) is better than the state and district, though its dropout rate (3.3%) is above both. This creates a striking district-level disconnect: the district is rated 2 stars, while Birchwood High is rated 5 stars. The academy’s lack of enrollment, poverty, and class-size data—plus only one grade’s test results—means families cannot see its full high school performance, but Social Studies and Science look like strengths, and Math is a potential early-warning area.