The top reported proficiency rate is 66% in Math. The lowest is 61% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Burke/memorial Elementary School
Burke/Memorial Elementary School serves grades two through four in Medway, a residential suburban town in Norfolk County. The school is one of four in the Medway Public Schools system, sitting between the early primary grades at McGovern School and the upper grades at Medway Middle School. The town itself is primarily a commuter community, situated within reach of Boston, Worcester, and Providence, with no commuter rail station in town and a layout that is largely auto-oriented outside its historic Village Street area. Housing values are high, consistent with an affluent suburban market, and the town has seen modest population growth since the last census.
Burke/Memorial’s enrollment is among the larger cohorts for its narrow grade band. The student body is predominantly white, with a Hispanic population of about one in ten and smaller shares of Asian, multiracial, and Black students. Data for the share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch was not available, nor were counts for students with individualized education programs or English learner status, so a reader may want to ask the school directly about these dimensions of student support and diversity.
On state testing in the most recent year reported, proficiency rates for all students in both math and English language arts were above the midpoint among districts in Norfolk County. The math proficiency rate was moderately higher than the English rate. The school’s multi-year trend line in math has hovered in a similar range for several years, while the English language arts results showed a dip in the prior testing year before recovering in the most recent round. There was no cohort of high school students, so no graduation rate applies. The school participates in the Massachusetts Next-Generation MCAS assessment.
The Medway district brief did not surface any recent changes of lasting impact that a parent would need to track, such as a boundary shift, a new program launch, or a leadership transition. The school itself holds a regular public school designation and is not a charter or magnet. No information was available about course offerings, staffing ratios, or discipline rates at Burke/Memorial, and these are gaps a prospective parent would want to fill by speaking with the school.
For a family already living in Medway or considering a move to this part of Norfolk County, Burke/Memorial represents a solid academic floor for the elementary grades. The housing market in the area is expensive, and the town offers preserved open space, parks, and community facilities like the Thayer Homestead and Medway Community Farm, but the school is not set in a walkable downtown. The strong proficiency numbers relative to the county suggest that most students are meeting state benchmarks, though the unexplained dip in English results a couple of years back is worth a direct conversation with the principal about what instructional adjustments were made and how the school tracks individual student progress across the grades it covers.
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