Wayne Bartels Middle

Wayne Bartels Middle is one of the middle-of-the-pack junior highs in Portage, Wisconsin, run under Portage Community School District, with 422 students on its rolls from grades 6 through 8.

Portage Community School District comprises 8 schools with combined enrollment of 1,956 students; Wayne Bartels Middle is among them.

On the student-mix side, Wayne Bartels Middle logs that White students make up the majority at 78%; the rest comes out to 13% Hispanic, 6% multiracial. By comparison, Columbia County as a whole is about 91% White, so the school skews meaningfully less White than its surroundings.

On the income-and-resources front, Wayne Bartels Middle records 32 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 13.3:1. That tracks the state average closely. Around 40% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator.

With demographic context factored in, Wayne Bartels Middle tracks the demographic baseline. The model predicts 53.1% given the school's FRL share; actual proficiency is 49.3%.

Zooming out to the county, census data for Columbia County shows the typical household earns roughly $85,351 per year, 26% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and roughly 5% of residents live below the federal poverty line. Wayne Bartels Middle is one of 31 public schools in Columbia County (combined enrollment of about 8,498 students).

Portage Academy of Achievement is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.0 miles from this campus. 6 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Wayne Bartels Middle comes 3rd of 5 in the immediate cluster, above the nearby-schools average of 47.7%.

Wayne Bartels Middle operates from a small-town location.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Wayne Bartels Middle has fell 24%, going from 557 students in 2018 to 422 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share ticked down from 82% to 78%.

On this page, the page collects discussion, questions, and updates around fundraisers, lost-and-found posts, and report-card season. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.