Summary
North Lakeland Elementary is a PK–8 school serving 158 students in the small lakeside community of Manitowish Waters in Wisconsin's Northwoods, and it is the only school in the North Lakeland School District.
Academically, North Lakeland Elementary performs well above the state average across every subject. In 2025-26 testing, students averaged 73.96% proficient in English language arts, 64.35% in math, 71.01% in science, and 78.71% in social studies, compared with state averages of 54.04%, 53.73%, 52.66%, and 65.07%. The school outperformed nearby Arbor Vitae-Woodruff Elementary — a similarly sized PK–8 school with a nearly identical low-income population — in 13 of 16 grade-and-subject comparisons, and far outpaced Lac du Flambeau Elementary, where proficiency rates are roughly a third as high. The exception is 4th grade math, where 41.18% of students were proficient — below the state's 52.87% and essentially even with Lac du Flambeau's 41.07%. With only about 17–21 students per tested grade, a single student's result can shift a grade-level score by 5–6 points, so this one weak spot is worth monitoring rather than treating as a final verdict.
Attendance is arguably the school's most impressive strength: chronic absenteeism was 8.5% in 2024-25, roughly half the state rate, less than half of Arbor Vitae-Woodruff's 19.6%, and about a quarter of Lac du Flambeau's 35.3% — down sharply from 37.2% just three years earlier. Low-income students here have ranked in the top 1–3% of comparable student groups statewide for three consecutive years, including 99th percentile in both 2022-23 and 2023-24. The school spends $25,440 per student, well above Arbor Vitae-Woodruff's $16,717 but far below Lac du Flambeau's $43,102, with 9.2 students per teacher. Its 2025-26 state ranking of 230th of 1,039 schools (78th percentile) is a pullback from 95th the prior year, but it matches where the school stood from 2015 to 2018 — one more year of data will clarify whether that reflects a return to baseline or a real change.
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