St Marys Area MS

St Marys Area MS, an intimate junior high in Saint Marys, Pennsylvania, part of Saint Marys Area SD, serves 459 students, covering grades 6 through 8. By comparison, Pennsylvania's public schools average about 594 students each, so St Marys Area MS sits 23% smaller than that benchmark.

Saint Marys Area SD comprises 4 schools with combined enrollment of 1,845 students; St Marys Area MS is among them.

Demographically, St Marys Area MS shows that 94% of students identify as White, making the school strongly White-majority. Other groups include 3% multiracial. That composition is broadly in line with Elk County as a whole.

Looking at school resources, The school lists 30 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 15.3:1. The state averages around 13.2:1, so this campus is higher than the state norm typical. Roughly 97% of students at St Marys Area MS qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal.

With demographic context factored in, St Marys Area MS performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 36.1%, the actual is 38.5%, a residual of +2.3 points.

Around the school, Elk County reports that the typical household earns roughly $66,380 per year, about 21% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 4%. St Marys Area MS is one of 10 public schools in Elk County (combined enrollment of about 3,139 students).

Nearest neighbor: St Marys Area SHS, around 0.2 miles off. Counting just inside five miles, 3 other public schools cluster around St Marys Area MS. On composite proficiency, St Marys Area MS comes 7th of 7 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 57.7%.

The school occupies a countryside site.

Looking at the recent track record. Over the past 7-year window, the student count decreased 3%: 471 students in 2018 compared to 459 in 2025.

In the discussion threads here, the page collects discussion, questions, and updates around open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.