The top reported proficiency rate is 71% in Math. The lowest is 41% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on New Searles School
New Searles School sits on Shady Lane in Nashua, the second-largest city in New Hampshire and a place whose identity has shifted over the decades from textile mills to defense contracting, high tech, and financial services. The school serves prekindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school within the Nashua School District. It draws from a city with three main commercial corridors: a historic downtown centered on Main Street, the Amherst Street corridor to the northwest, and the South Nashua shopping district along Daniel Webster Highway near the Massachusetts border. The school's zip code carries home values that sit above the state benchmark and well above the national one, with rents that are moderate relative to local incomes. The housing market in Hillsborough County has been warming, with rising listing activity and prices that have held steady or ticked up modestly over the past year.
On New Hampshire's state assessment, New Searles posts strong math results. Most tested students in grades three and four reach proficiency, and fifth-grade math remains solidly above midpoint even as it dips from the earlier grades. English language arts results are more mixed, landing in a moderate range across all three tested grades, with fifth grade the strongest of the three. Science, tested only in fifth grade, is the clear soft spot, with fewer than half of tested students reaching proficiency. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, particularly how science instruction is sequenced across the upper elementary grades. Participation rates are generally solid in grades three and four but drop noticeably in fifth grade, which affects the reliability of those upper-grade results and is worth asking about.
Because New Searles is an elementary school, there is no graduation rate, and the prekindergarten and kindergarten grades are not part of state testing. Data on English learner status and special education enrollment was not available in the provided materials, so those population shares cannot be characterized here. The school does report a relatively low share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch compared with many New Hampshire schools, which often correlates with stronger test performance and fewer concentrated needs. The student body is predominantly white, with a sizable Hispanic population and a smaller group identifying as two or more races. Asian and Black students each make up a small fraction of enrollment.
The Nashua School District has made two parent-relevant moves recently. It brought back a Title I preschool program, expanding early childhood access for families across the district, and it centralized all student registrations through a Welcome Center at Birch Hill Elementary. Both shifts matter for families considering enrollment or with younger children approaching school age.
Nashua itself offers a lot of the infrastructure families tend to weigh. Mine Falls Park sits near downtown and the redeveloping Millyard district, providing substantial green space. The city has invested in a Riverwalk, new housing units downtown, and the Broad Street Parkway to improve connectivity to the Everett Turnpike. Two regional medical centers, Southern New Hampshire Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital, anchor the local health infrastructure. Major employers such as BAE Systems, Dell, and Oracle reflect the city's high-tech and defense orientation. The Millyard district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is being converted into loft apartments, artist studios, and startup workspaces, which is reshaping the area near downtown.
What the data does not cover is also worth naming. There was no information on staffing ratios, course offerings, discipline data, attendance patterns, or chronic absenteeism. No comparison fact-set was provided to position New Searles against neighboring schools in the county. No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say whether these proficiency levels are improving, declining, or holding steady. A family evaluating this school should treat the current results as a single-year snapshot and ask the school directly for trend data and for context on the lower fifth-grade participation rate.
New Searles reads as a solidly performing elementary school in a mid-sized New Hampshire city with strong economic anchors, moderate housing costs relative to the region, and active civic investment. Its math instruction appears to be a strength, its ELA results are adequate, and its science outcomes are an area a family would want to understand better before enrolling.
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