New Hampshire school safety

New Hampshire spreads 498 schools across 194 school districts. Most of those districts are small, and that shapes what this page can do. Only seven have enough schools with records complete enough to score, so only seven appear in our district ranking. The list is short because of how the state is organized, not because the districts left off it did anything wrong. For most families here, the school-level pages are where the useful information is.

What the grades mean

Every school in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection is compared with roughly 1,500 schools nationwide closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grades. Among the peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of the incident rate — a deliberately low bar. A school reporting less than a quarter of what that bar implies for its size has not given evidence of safety. A and B mean records we believe. C means a school reported almost nothing but is small enough that a genuine zero is common — not evidence of safety, but not implausible. D and E mean schools of that size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this one reported almost none.

We publish a safety score only for A and B schools. In New Hampshire that is 277 of 498. When a school shows no score, the method is telling you it could not stand behind the paperwork. That is the method working, not a gap in it.

Thirty New Hampshire schools land in D or E, 6.0% of the state. Nationally the same share is 11.3%. New Hampshire schools file records that hold up more often than schools elsewhere do. That is a fact about reporting and nothing more. The comparison is not adjusted for state, and differences between states in this collection are differences in reporting behavior, not in child safety.

Among the seven ranked districts, Rochester School District places safer than 67% of ranked US districts, with 10 of the 11 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. Nashua School District is safer than 60%, with 16 of 19. Contoocook Valley, Londonderry and Merrimack follow. Those counts describe each district's own scored set, not how many schools the district runs.

Safest ranked cities in New Hampshire

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 New Hampshire city with schools

Every New Hampshire school district