The top reported proficiency rate is 79% in Science. The lowest is 61% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Long Beach Middle School
Long Beach Middle School sits in a residential Gulf Coast community that lies between Pass Christian and Gulfport, part of the Gulfport-Biloxi metropolitan area. The town began as a radish-farming settlement and later turned toward tourism, with a commercial beachfront strip along the Gulf of Mexico that remains a defining civic feature. Long Beach carries a Mississippi Main Street Community designation, pointing to a traditional downtown corridor, and the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Park campus occupies a beachfront site nearby, serving as a major local institution and the only four-year public campus on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The city is still working its way back from Hurricane Katrina, with residents returning and condominiums being repaired, though publicly reported accounts note that beachfront business has not returned to pre-storm levels, partly because of FEMA and MEMA building codes. The school district operates five campuses spread across the city rather than clustered on a single site.
The middle school lists grades six through eight in its directory, though the current enrollment data shows students concentrated in seventh and eighth grades with a small ungraded group and none reported in sixth. A parent considering this school may want to confirm with the district where sixth-grade students are served, since the enrollment figures do not show any sixth graders on this campus.
On Mississippi's MAAP assessments for the most recent school year, the academic results tell a mixed but largely positive story. Seventh-grade math stands out as a clear strength, with a strong majority of tested students scoring proficient or above. Eighth-grade science is similarly strong. Eighth-grade math and eighth-grade English language arts both land at a solid middle ground, with a respectable share of students reaching proficiency. The soft spot is seventh-grade English language arts, where just over half of tested students reached proficiency. That result is below the school's own performance in other subjects and grades, and a parent may want to look into this further with the school to understand what supports are in place for reading and writing at that grade level. Participation rates were not reported in the available data, and no multi-year trend information was provided, so it is not possible to say from these figures whether performance is improving, holding steady, or slipping over time.
The student body is predominantly white, with a meaningful Black population and a smaller group of students identifying as two or more races. Asian and Hispanic students each make up a modest slice of enrollment. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which reflects the working-class character of parts of this community. The available data does not include counts for students with individualized education programs or English learners, and no discipline, course-access, staffing, or attendance figures were provided. Civil-rights data was also absent from the available materials.
Housing in the Long Beach zip code sits above the Mississippi state benchmark but well below the national figure, which places it in a moderate range for the region. Rents are affordable relative to income by national standards, and the estimated monthly mortgage on a typical home runs only slightly higher than typical rent, making ownership plausible for families with steady incomes. The local housing market has seen modest recent appreciation. The broader economic picture includes a low national unemployment environment and rising shelter costs, which could affect families renting in the area.
No specific district policy changes, curriculum initiatives, referenda, or tax measures surfaced in the available research, so this narrative does not include any. A family evaluating Long Beach Middle School is looking at a school with solid math and science results, a weaker seventh-grade ELA result worth asking about, and a community still defining itself after years of recovery along the Gulf.
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