The top reported proficiency rate is 31% in Science. The lowest is 21% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Nantucket Intermediate School
Nantucket Intermediate School serves a single purpose on an island that feels like a small town and a seasonal resort at the same time. The school only runs grades three through five, a brief but important window in elementary schooling. For families looking at what comes next, the school sits on the same Surfside Road campus as the district's middle school and high school, so the progression from this building to the next is physically straightforward.
The student body is diverse in a way that reflects the island's year-round population. Close to half the students are Hispanic, with a large share of White students and smaller numbers of Black and multiracial students. The enrollment total is moderate for a school serving three grades. This is a setting where a child will encounter peers from many backgrounds, which is a plain fact of the community rather than a programmatic choice. Free and reduced-price lunch data was not available, so a parent may want to ask the school directly about economic diversity. The same goes for special education and English learner counts, which were absent from the data.
The academic picture requires direct attention. On the state's NextGen MCAS assessments, the share of students scoring at proficient or above in English language arts was around one in five. In mathematics, it was slightly higher, though still in the same range. Science proficiency, tested in grade five only, was a bit higher but still well below a majority. These results put the school in a position where a parent would want to investigate further, particularly to understand how the school supports students who are not yet at grade level and how it stretches those who are.
A multi-year look at the same tests shows a pattern of decline over time. In the years before the pandemic, English proficiency was in the low to mid-forties, and math was in the high thirties. Since then, both subjects have settled at lower levels, with the most recent results representing the lowest point in the available record. The 2024-25 scores in both English and math held at those low levels without further drop, but they did not recover. This is a sustained soft spot, and a parent should expect the school to be able to talk about what it is doing in response.
The school is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet. There is no Title I status reported. The data does not include information on programs, course access, discipline, or staffing, so the full picture of what happens inside the building is incomplete in this profile.
The context of the island itself matters for any family considering this school. Nantucket is a mix of dense commercial core, preserved open space, and residential neighborhoods connected by bike paths and seasonal transit. The economy runs on tourism, and the year-round population is small enough that the school system is one of the major employers. The real estate market is among the most expensive in the country, with home values well above state and national medians. Housing supply is constrained by conservation land that protects over a third of the island from development, and by the island's geography. The population swells dramatically in summer, but school-year families live here year-round.
The district itself did not have any recent changes publicly reported that would shift a family's decision. For parents weighing Nantucket Intermediate School, the central questions are academic. The test results are lower than what many families would hope for, and the trend has moved in the wrong direction over the past several years. A visit and a conversation with the principal about instruction, intervention, and how the school measures growth would be a reasonable next step. The peer environment is diverse, the campus is shared with older grades, and the island setting is unique, but the academic numbers are the part that deserves the most scrutiny.
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