Mississippi school safety

Start with the district table on this page and notice how short it is. Mississippi has 156 school districts. Only 27 of them have enough schools with records complete enough to score, so only 27 can be ranked. The rest are not missing from the list because something went wrong. They simply do not have enough verifiable reporting behind them to say anything responsible about.

The same pattern holds at the school level. There are 1,054 schools in the state, and 470 of them carry a published safety score. We publish a score only for schools whose reporting we believe. A school that reported almost nothing, but is small enough that a true zero is ordinary, gets no score either — not because we suspect it, but because an empty record is not evidence of safety. That is the method working as designed.

What the reporting numbers do and don't say

We grade the reporting doubtful at 171 Mississippi schools, or 16.2% of the state. Nationally the figure is 11.3%. So a parent here is somewhat more likely to look up a school and find records that cannot be verified against what schools of that size normally report.

Read that carefully. It is a statement about paperwork, not about children. Our comparison is not adjusted by state, and differences between states in this federal collection are differences in reporting practice. Nothing here says a Mississippi school is more dangerous than a school anywhere else, and nothing here says the opposite.

Among ranked districts, Lamar County School District comes out safest, ahead of 97% of ranked US districts, with 9 of the 16 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. Prentiss Co School Dist follows at 84% (5 of 6), then Lauderdale Co School Dist at 81% (9 of 11). Greenville Public Schools and Madison Co School Dist both land at 77%, with 10 of 13 and 11 of 21 schools scored.

All of it comes from the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection. Look up your school. If it has no score, the page will tell you which reason applies.

Safest ranked cities in Mississippi

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Mississippi city with schools

Every Mississippi school district