It was recently reported that the St. Ignace Area Schools received district-wide accreditation from the Advanced Ed North Central Commission on Accreditation. St. Ignace is the first school in the Upper Peninsula to have earned districtwide accreditation for all of its school buildings. The credit for the work in achieving this distinction goes to the school improvement teams and the school administrators in each of the buildings.

Accreditation focuses on a variety of things, but the main focus is on academic achievement and academic improvement. Within the past month the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Mike Flannigan, published a new ranking of schools called Top to Bottom. This is a 57-page report that rank orders every single school building in the State of Michigan. The St. Ignace Middle School was ranked at the 95.3 percentile. A percentile ranking of 95 means that out of 100 schools, only five scored higher. There are close to 3,500 schools in the state, which means that our middle school is ranked as a higher performing school than 3,335 of the 3,500 school buildings statewide. For statistical reasons, schools with fewer than 30 students testing were not ranked.

The high percentile ranking for the St. Ignace Middle School and the St. Ignace Area Schools recent district-wide accreditation go hand in hand. Both serve to demonstrate the academic quality of our school system, which is the result of focused efforts by staff, students, and parents.