The top reported proficiency rate is 27% in Math. The lowest is 21% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Lincoln Elementary
Lincoln Elementary is a small neighborhood public school in Alpena, Michigan, serving kindergarten through fifth grade as part of Alpena Public Schools. It sits on West Lake Street in the city of Alpena, the county seat and only incorporated city in Alpena County, on the shore of Lake Huron's Thunder Bay. The enrollment is small for a school covering six grade levels, and the student body is nearly entirely white, with a handful of students identifying as Hispanic or multiracial. The school community is one of deep economic need: nearly all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Data on students receiving special education services and English learners was not reported, so those counts are a gap a parent may want to ask the school about directly.
On state assessments, the most recent M-STEP results show proficiency well below where most families would want it. In English language arts, roughly a quarter or fewer of tested students met proficiency benchmarks across third, fourth, and fifth grades, with third grade the lowest. Math results were weaker. Third grade saw about a quarter of students proficient, but fourth and fifth grades fell into the lowest reporting band, with no students reaching proficiency in either grade. Fifth-grade science landed around a fifth proficient, and fifth-grade social studies was also in the lowest reported range. These are sobering results. The tested groups are small, so a few students moving in or out can shift the picture noticeably, but the pattern is consistent across subjects and grades. A parent considering Lincoln would want to ask the school directly how it is responding to these results, what interventions are in place, and how growth is being tracked for each child.
Because Lincoln serves only elementary grades, there is no graduation rate, and the state does not test kindergarten through second grade, so results for those early grades are not available. Chronic absenteeism data was not reported for this school. The neighbor comparison set, which uses districts in Alpena County, was too small to generate meaningful proficiency or graduation benchmarks, so no comparative positioning is available. That is a function of the county having very few districts rather than a limitation unique to Lincoln.
The housing market around Lincoln Elementary is one of the more affordable in the state. Typical home values in the school's zip code sit well below both the Michigan and national benchmarks, and the price-to-income ratio is low relative to national norms, meaning a family earning a typical income faces a lighter purchase burden here than in most of the country. Home values have been appreciating at a healthy clip recently, outpacing state and national growth rates, though rents were not available for this area. Alpena itself is a small industrial and residential city with an older demographic profile. Its economy is anchored by a regional medical center, a cement plant, a concrete block machinery manufacturer, and a drywall facility, with Alpena Community College and a military training center also employing residents. The downtown core along the Thunder Bay River has a walkable stretch with a theatre, a cinema in a repurposed department store, and the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center. The broader city is auto-oriented, with retail concentrated along highway corridors. No public bus transit system was identified. The Alpena Mall largely closed in recent years, and some adaptive reuse downtown is filling parts of that gap. Population in the city has been stable to slightly declining over the long term.
Alpena Public Schools is geographically the largest district in the state, with elementary schools spread across a wide area rather than clustered in town. We looked for parent-relevant district changes such as bonds, curriculum shifts, or property tax measures and found little surfaced in available sources, so we left that out rather than guess. No program offerings, staffing figures, discipline data, or course-access information was available for Lincoln specifically. These gaps mean a parent will need to go to the school directly for questions about extracurriculars, classroom support, and school climate, since the available data does not speak to them.
What the evidence shows is a very small, high-poverty elementary school in an affordable, older industrial city on Lake Huron, with state test results that are low across subjects and especially low in upper-elementary math. For a family already tied to this neighborhood, the questions worth asking are about the school's response plan and the supports in place for each child. For a family with options, the academic results are a serious consideration to weigh alongside the affordability and community context.
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