The top reported proficiency rate is 24% in English language arts. The lowest is 15% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Countryside Academy
Countryside Academy is a kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade district in Berrien County, Michigan, operating two schools: an elementary building and a combined middle-high school. The enrollment is small for a full K-12 district, with roughly fifty to a hundred students per grade. The student body is predominantly Black, with a large Hispanic presence and a small white population; a handful of students are multiracial, and one or two are Asian or American Indian. Free-or-reduced-price-lunch counts were not reported, so the economic profile of the families served here is not something the available data can confirm one way or the other. The same is true for special-education and English-learner rates, which were missing. No charter, magnet, or Title I status was provided in the data we received, so the governance structure is something a parent would need to verify directly with the academy.
On state assessments from the most recent school year, proficiency patterns are a concern across both tested subjects. In math, the share of students reaching proficiency starts low in third grade and drops steadily through the middle grades. By sixth grade, essentially no tested students reached the proficient threshold, and seventh and eighth grade results remain in the single digits. The strongest math result is in fourth grade, where roughly three in ten tested students were proficient. ELA is more uneven. Fourth grade and eighth grade show the brighter spots, with the eighth-grade ELA proficiency rate being the single strongest number in the entire assessment profile. But third, fifth, and sixth grades are all well below that level, and the pattern does not suggest a steady upward trajectory as students move through the grades.
Science and social studies results, tested only in fifth and eighth grade, sit in the same lower range. Science proficiency is near a fifth of tested students in both grades. Social studies is stronger in eighth grade than in fifth, though still modest. Against its county peers, Countryside Academy's overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades places it in the bottom quartile among Berrien County's districts. That comparison set uses county membership, since boundary adjacency data was not available, so the positioning reflects the full county cohort rather than a tight cluster of immediate neighbors.
Chronic absenteeism is reported and sits above the county median, which means a larger-than-typical share of students are missing substantial instructional time. Given the proficiency profile, attendance is worth asking about when visiting the school, because lost days compound the academic ground the district needs to recover. Per-pupil current spending falls in the middle range of the county's lower half, so the district is funded at a level that is typical for the area but not at the top.
No graduation rate was available for this district in the data provided. A gap like this can reflect the nature of the school or how the state reports the figure for this entity, but the data we have does not explain the reason, so we name it rather than guess. A parent with a high-school-age student should ask the academy directly about its graduation and postsecondary outcomes. We also looked for recent district-level changes such as curriculum shifts, property-tax referenda, or other parent-relevant developments, and the search returned only static directory and demographic information, so there is nothing new to report on that front.
No locale brief or community and economic context was available, so there is no housing-market or town-level detail to draw on here. Without that, a family would be reading this primarily for the academic picture, and that picture is one where students are struggling to reach proficiency in most grades and subjects, with a few exceptions in middle-school ELA. The peer environment is a predominantly Black and Hispanic student body in a small district setting. The academic pathway, based on what is reported, does not show broad strength, and a parent may want to look into the academy's approach to math instruction and attendance support in particular before making a decision.
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