Northport Public School students and staff received some of the highest marks in the state last week, according to the recently published Mackinac Center 2025 public elementary and middle school report card.
The context and performance report card is the fifth in a series that’s designed to measure the academic performance of Michigan elementary and middle schools and uses multiple years of student achievement data “so as to not allow one year’s results to unduly influence a school’s ratings.”
The district finished 26th overall best school in the state out of 2,188 public, charter, and selective schools. In the traditional public schools category, Northport finished in 17th place out of 1,916 schools, and in rural public schools, the district finished 8th out of 598 schools. Finally, Northport came in 7th for most improved in the state out of 2,188 schools.
Neil Wetherbee, Northport School superintendent, said he received the report last Wednesday and was pleasantly surprised to learn of the scores when he reviewed them. As the superintendent and parent of Northport students himself, he said the news was extremely validating as staff have been working hard to be the best school they can be to the students. While it’s easy to focus on problems or areas of improvement, he added that it was nice to be reminded of the great work happening in the district.
“I’m proud of our staff and students. Due to our location and size, Northport Public School is quite often overlooked. However, we have a long tradition of being a high-quality school. We talk about our successes amongst ourselves in the school, but it’s nice that someone else noticed,” Wetherbee said in an email. “I’ve known for a long time that we’re doing well, but it’s always satisfying when a neutral third party uses data and agrees. I feel tremendous pressure to make sure that all of our students have the opportunity to be successful; I’ve made countless decisions over my nine years at Northport, and it’s a bit of relief when you see the results we’ve all been working towards.”
Other Leelanau County public schools were also scored in the Mackinac Center 2025 school report card. Leland Public School received a state rank of 484 out of 2,188 schools, followed by Glen Lake Community Schools which received a state rank of 896. Suttons Bay Public Virtual School received a state rank of 1,039, while its elementary/middle school received a rank of 1,140.
In the 2023-2024 academic year, Northport also received high scores from the state through their school index. The district received an overall score of 93.91% out of 100 for the 2023-2024 academic year, which combines seven school index components to get a final overall index. The components used and considered in these scores for Northport include: growth, proficiency, graduation rate, school quality/student success, and assessment participation.
Northport has a student population of 127 students this year, and is one of the smaller school districts in Leelanau County. Wetherbee said the smaller student population allows the district and its staff to be nimble and to focus on each student as an individual.
“All schools do this, but it’s much easier with fewer students to focus on,” he said. “Being nimble can make it challenging to stay the course. Small classes are a double-edged sword though. As a teacher, I would rather have a class that is too small than too big, but it can make planning projects, discussions, moments, etc. much more difficult.”
The success reflected in the Michigan School Index System and Mackinac Center report card is partially due to a school board that has kept a clear vision during the nine years that Wetherbee has been superintendent. In addition, he explained that the district has influential teacher leaders who’ve been at Northport for a longer period of time than himself, as well as a robust Multi-Tiered Systems of Support process that allows them to “look at each student, the whole child, every six weeks as a team.”
“The classroom teachers, principal, counselors, and I look at what each student needs to be successful. We develop and monitor interventions to ensure growth,” he explained. “We’ve dedicated significant resources, time and money, in our teachers’ professional learning. We’ve kept a consistent focus on teacher clarity, making decisions by design, and identifying how we will know what success looks like for our students. We shifted behavior and discipline from reactive to proactive. We’ve also had really consistent, dedicated support from the ISD (Northwest Education Services), and in particular, Paul Bauer. The bottom line is that we as a school have worked really, really hard.”
