Florence Middle

Florence Middle is a small, rural public school serving grades 7 and 8 in Florence, Wisconsin — a community in Florence County in the state's northeast corner, near the Michigan Upper Peninsula line — with 56 students enrolled. It is the entire middle school of the Florence County School District, and no other schools lie within 20 miles of it, so there is no nearby building to compare against. Its most recent statewide ranking places it 262nd of 643 middle schools — 59th percentile, 3 stars — modestly above the Wisconsin median and up from 44th percentile, 2 stars the year before.

Academically, the school's signature is social studies and science. In 8th-grade social studies, 79.17% of students scored proficient against 64.63% statewide, and science was also above the state average. Seventh-grade math (65.38% vs. 55.67%) beat the state by nearly 10 points, and 8th-grade English language arts was essentially even with it. The clear soft spot is 8th-grade math, where 41.67% scored proficient versus 53.67% statewide — a 12-point gap and the largest single-subject deficit in the school's data. Because 7th-grade math is a strength, it's worth asking the school whether this reflects a transition-year issue or simply two different groups of students.

Attendance is the school's steadiest strength: chronic absenteeism was 7.0% in 2024-2025, less than half Wisconsin's 17.3%, and has been below the state rate every reported year. The school also spends $20,020 per student with a 7.8-to-1 student-teacher ratio, down sharply from 12.2-to-1 two years earlier, though some of that reflects the fixed costs of a very small building. Low-income students — roughly 46% of enrollment — rank in the 85th percentile statewide with 4 stars. One important caution: with 56 students, a single child can shift a grade-level proficiency rate by 3 to 4 points, so read these figures as snapshots of specific students rather than a stable verdict on instruction.