Farnsworth Middle

Farnsworth Middle is a grades 6–8 school in the Sheboygan Area School District in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, serving 443 students. In 2025–2026 it ranked 516th of 643 Wisconsin middle schools (20th percentile, 1 star) — the lowest-ranked middle school in Sheboygan, and a position in the bottom quartile it has held in nearly every year of the past decade.

Nearby middle schools outside the district rank much higher: Sheboygan Falls Middle (53rd percentile), Riverview Middle (73rd), Howards Grove Middle (91st), Cedar Grove-Belgium Middle (93rd), Oostburg Middle (98th) and Kohler Middle (99th). Within the district, Urban Middle, George D Warriner Middle, Etude Middle and Horace Mann Middle all landed slightly higher, between the 28th and 31st percentile. Test proficiency trails both district and state in nearly every subject. The widest gaps are in 8th-grade math (32.12%, versus 53.67% statewide), 8th-grade English language arts, science (34.31% versus 51.86%) and social studies (48.91% versus 64.63%). Only 6th-grade math matched the district average, and it was still below the state.

Farnsworth serves a high-need population: 71.78% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch in 2024–2025, the highest rate among the compared schools, and chronic absenteeism was 21.3%. That absenteeism figure has improved notably from 31.4% in 2022–2023, though it remains above the state rate of 17.3% and far above nearby districts such as Oostburg School District and Kohler School District (2.4% each). Despite spending $16,256 per student and maintaining a low student-teacher ratio of 11.8 — both more favorable than most nearby schools — outcomes remain lower, suggesting that staffing and funding alone are not driving results. The clearest bright spots are falling absenteeism, a 0.3% dropout rate, and gains in 6th-grade math and English language arts, alongside improving subgroup results for some student groups.