The reported proficiency rate for English language arts is 73%.
Original Research by School Decision on Concord Academy Boyne
Concord Academy Boyne is a small charter school serving kindergarten through twelfth grade on Boyne City's east side, just off Dietz Road. It is one of only a handful of public school options in Charlevoix County, and its size shapes nearly everything about how it operates. The school sits in the same district entity as itself, a single-school charter academy, so there is no separate district governance layer above it. Enrollment is small enough that entire grade cohorts can be counted on one hand, which has a direct effect on the availability of academic data.
Boyne City itself is a lakeside community at the eastern end of Lake Charlevoix, Michigan's third largest inland lake. The downtown core along Lake Street and Water Street, listed as the Boyne City Central Historic District, has a walkable stretch of shops, eateries, and galleries. A year-round farmers market moves between Veterans Park in summer and the Pavilion in winter, giving the town a steady rhythm of community gatherings. The broader city is low-density residential outside that core, and the local economy leans heavily on tourism and outdoor recreation, with boating, fishing, skiing, and snowmobiling drawing visitors across seasons. Young State Park sits just northwest of the city limits. The housing market here is more expensive than the state and national benchmarks, with typical home values well above both, reflecting the broader northern Michigan trend of rising costs in recreation-driven communities. Population growth has been modest.
The school's academic picture is thin, and the reason is structural. In the most recent state assessment cycle, Concord Academy Boyne had zero tested students in grades three through seven across math, English language arts, science, and social studies. Those results are suppressed, and a parent reading that suppression should understand it as a function of the school's small cohort sizes rather than a sign of poor performance. The state simply does not report proficiency for groups that small. The only grade with a testable cohort was eighth grade, where eleven students sat for the PSAT in math and ELA and the M-STEP in science and social studies.
That eighth-grade data tells a mixed story. In English language arts, proficiency was strong, with the majority of tested students scoring at or above the proficient threshold, and the school lands in the top quartile among Charlevoix County districts on the overall proficiency index. A parent should know that this index is essentially built from that single ELA result, since no other grade produced reportable proficiency rates, so the comparison carries limited weight. In math, science, and social studies, the eighth-grade cohort showed very low proficiency, with no students reaching the proficient level in any of those three subjects. The reported ranges place proficiency somewhere in the lowest band the state publishes. This is a soft spot worth a parent's attention, and a conversation with the school about how it supports math and science instruction in the upper elementary and middle grades would be reasonable.
The school does not have a reported graduation rate, and that gap likely reflects the very small high school cohort rather than a failure to graduate students. Program offerings, staffing details, course access, discipline data, and attendance figures were not available in the provided data, so those dimensions of school life cannot be characterized here. Information on students with individualized education programs and English learners was also missing. About half the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, and the enrollment is overwhelmingly white, with a small number of students identifying as Hispanic, multirace, or Black.
What this school offers is a small, continuous kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade setting in a single building, in a community where outdoor recreation and lakefront life define the culture outside school. Families looking for a place where their child can stay in one school from elementary through high school, and where class sizes are intimate, may find that appealing. Families who want a broad range of Advanced Placement courses, career pathways, or extracurricular depth may find the scale limiting. The ELA result is encouraging, the math and science results are a flag worth raising with the school, and most of the academic record is too sparse to form a full judgment. A visit and direct questions about the upper grades would go a long way.
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