Summary:
ZIP 53578 (Prairie du Sac) is served by four schools, all in the Sauk Prairie School District — Bridges Elementary (PK–2), Grand Avenue Elementary (3–5), Tower Rock Elementary (PK–5), and Sauk Prairie High (9–12), with a combined enrollment of 1,929. The district ranks 197th of 432 in Wisconsin at 3 stars. No middle school sits in this ZIP, so grades 6–8 aren't represented, and Bridges Elementary has no test scores because the state doesn't test before third grade.
Grand Avenue Elementary is the academic standout: lowest per-student spending ($14,205) and a 13.3:1 ratio, yet above state in 15 of 16 assessments (+4.7 points on average) and holding the 57th–61st percentile across three years with 3 stars. Bridges Elementary has the area's lowest chronic absenteeism at 6.4%. Tower Rock Elementary is the outlier in the other direction — 43.66% low-income enrollment versus roughly 23–24% at the other three schools, a rank that fell from the 53rd to the 26th percentile in three years, 1 star, 16.0% chronic absenteeism, and test scores averaging 8.7 points below state (a roughly 13.5-point gap with Grand Avenue). Notably, Tower Rock has the highest spending ($16,582) and smallest classes (10.3:1), so neither spending nor class size predicts outcomes here.
Sauk Prairie High posts a 93.4% graduation rate and 1.0% dropout rate, both better than state, but 23.6% of its students are chronically absent — far above the district's 14.9%. Its ELA proficiency fell 7.88 points from 2024-25 to 2025-26 while state figures stayed flat, moving from above state to below it. Social Studies remains a strength area-wide, and single-grade swings at small schools are best read as noise rather than trend.
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