Public school / Middle
Harpers Choice Middle
Columbia, Maryland
- NCES ID
- 240042000737
- District
- Howard County Public Schools
- School type
- Regular
- Title I
- Not designated
Harpers Choice Middle is a public middle school in Columbia, Maryland, run by Howard County Public Schools. It enrols 497 students — the 37629th largest of 1,425 public schools in Maryland.
Reported figures, 2022–2023
The Common Core of Data is a directory collection: it records size and staffing, not achievement. Nothing here says whether a school is good.
Enrollment
497
Teachers
44.0
Students per teacher
11.3
Free or reduced-price lunch
50.3%
How these figures are defined
Enrollment
Students reported in the autumn headcount. Size is not quality — it is here because it is the figure every other one has to be read against, and because a school of 90 and a school of 4,000 are not comparable on anything else.
Teachers
Classroom teachers in full-time equivalents, so a half-time teacher counts as 0.5. Non-teaching staff are excluded.
Students per teacher
Enrollment divided by teacher FTE. It is not class size: it counts every teacher against every student, including specialists who never take a full class. A school can have 15 students per teacher and 30 in the room.
Free or reduced-price lunch
Share of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals — the most widely used proxy for concentrated poverty in a school. Districts under community eligibility report all students as eligible, which inflates the figure and makes cross-district comparison unreliable.
Within Howard County Public Schools
Schools in the same district, which is the comparison the data actually supports — a peer group defined by who runs them rather than by whichever names sort nearby.
- 1Reservoir High1,837 students
- 2Howard High1,741 students
- 3Marriotts Ridge High1,716 students
- 4Long Reach High1,714 students
- 5Mount Hebron High1,621 students
- 6Atholton High1,467 students
- 7River Hill High1,424 students
- 8Oakland Mills High1,401 students
- Enrollment−8.0%
- Teachers+15.8%
- Students per teacher−23.1%
- Free or reduced-price lunch−10.6%
Where this sits
Sources & licence
Collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. Nothing here is edited, interpolated or estimated.
Provenance
- National Center for Education Statistics
- Common Core of Data — school and district directory