Summary:
ZIP code 54529 covers Harshaw, Wisconsin and contains just one school: Northwoods Community Elementary, a PK–5 elementary school with 97 students in the Rhinelander School District. Because it is the only school in the area, there are no local peer schools to compare it against — the meaningful comparisons are to its own district, to Wisconsin as a whole, and to its own past years.
The headline story is that this is a 4-star school inside a 2-star district. The district ranks 292nd of 432 Wisconsin districts (32nd percentile), while Northwoods has earned 4 stars in each of the last three years and ranked 304th of 1,039 schools in 2025-2026 (71st percentile). On the 2025-2026 Forward Exam, the school averaged 64.7% proficiency across eight subject-and-grade measures, compared with 50.0% for the district and 54.8% statewide — beating the state on 7 of 8 measures and its own district on all 8. The pattern held the year before as well, with a stronger 70.8% average. Fourth-grade science is the consistent exception, sitting slightly below the state in both years.
Context matters here. Chronic absenteeism is 5.9%, well below the district's 12.8% and the state's 17.3%. The school reports a 9.2-to-1 student-teacher ratio, $19,632 in per-student spending, and a free/reduced-price lunch share of 24.74%. Two things for parents to watch: statewide rank slipped from the 84th to the 71st percentile, and with only about 15–20 test-takers per grade, a single student can shift results by roughly 5–7 percentage points, so year-to-year swings are volatile rather than firm trends.
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