Ballard Elementary School, Niles MI

Original Research by School Decision on Ballard Elementary School

Ballard Elementary School sits on the west side of Niles, a small city on the St. Joseph River just north of the Indiana state line. Niles calls itself "The City of Four Flags" for its history under French, British, Spanish, and American governance, and it has the feel of a quiet river town with a historic downtown along East Main Street. Riverfront Park, stretching along the St. Joseph, anchors community life with seasonal festivals like the Hunter Ice Festival and Apple Festival Parade. The city has been losing population gradually, and it carries a state designation as a redevelopment-ready community. Home values here run well below both the Michigan and national benchmarks, which makes the area relatively affordable for families looking to buy, though current mortgage rates add pressure to monthly costs. Ballard is one of several elementary schools spread across Niles Community Schools, a district that has recently passed bond measures funding classroom additions, safety upgrades, new HVAC systems, and a robotics lab at the high school. Those improvements are ongoing and signal a district investing in its physical plant.

The school serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grade and has a sizable enrollment for an elementary building, with a large kindergarten cohort relative to the upper grades. A very high share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which places Ballard among schools serving a economically pressed community. The student body is mostly white, with a meaningful Hispanic presence and smaller shares of students identifying as Black, multiracial, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. The school does not report figures for English learners or students with individualized education programs, so those populations cannot be characterized here.

On Michigan's M-STEP assessments from the most recent school year, Ballard's results paint a mixed picture. Math proficiency starts reasonably in third grade, dips in fourth, and falls further by fifth grade, where fewer than a third of tested students reached proficiency. English language arts tells a different story: third grade proficiency is modest, but fourth grade jumps to about half of students proficient, and fifth grade holds most of that gain. Science proficiency in fifth grade lands in the mid-thirties range, while social studies is the weakest area, with only about a quarter of fifth graders proficient. Taken together, the school's overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades sits above the midpoint among districts in Berrien County, which is a reasonably solid standing given the economic challenges in the student population. The decline in math from third to fifth grade is the clearest soft spot, and a parent may want to look into how the school supports math progression across the upper elementary grades.

Because Ballard is an elementary school, there is no graduation rate, no AP or career-pathway data, and no chronic absenteeism figure available in this dataset. Those measures simply do not apply at this grade band. Participation rates for the state assessments were not reported, and no multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say whether these results represent improvement or decline from prior years.

What a family finds at Ballard is a traditional public elementary school in a working community where housing is affordable and the district is actively upgrading its facilities. The academic results are uneven but generally mid-pack or better for the county, with relative strength in upper-grade reading and a clear slide in upper-grade math. For parents weighing fit, the school's size, its economic diversity, and its place in a district investing in long-term improvements are the things worth seeing in person.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 344%

School 44% · District 52% · ▼ 8 pts below district

▲ 2 pts above state median · ▼ 1 pts below county median

Grade 439%

School 39% · District 49% · ▼ 10 pts below district

even with state median · ▼ 7 pts below county median

Grade 527%

School 27% · District 32% · ▼ 6 pts below district

▼ 5 pts below state median · ▼ 13 pts below county median

English language arts

Grade 333%

School 33% · District 36% · ▼ 3 pts below district

▼ 5 pts below state median · ▼ 9 pts below county median

Grade 450%

School 50% · District 50%

▲ 9 pts above state median · even with county median

Grade 545%

School 45% · District 54% · ▼ 9 pts below district

▲ 3 pts above state median · ▼ 5 pts below county median

Science

Grade 536%

School 36% · District 43% · ▼ 7 pts below district

▼ 4 pts below state median · ▼ 3 pts below county median

Social studies

Grade 524%

School 24% · District 27% · ▼ 3 pts below district

▼ 4 pts below state median · ▼ 6 pts below county median

This schoolNiles Community Schools, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.

Proficiency by household income

English language arts

Grade 3Lower-income24%Higher-income57%33 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income44%Higher-income74%30 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income46%Higher-income42%4 pp gap

Mathematics

Grade 3Lower-income39%Higher-income57%18 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income31%Higher-income68%37 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income27%Higher-income26%0 pp gap