Schools

If children are part of this decision, this chapter is probably why you are on this site, and it is the one where relocation content is least trustworthy. The genre standard is a school-rating aggregator’s composite score, quoted with no methodology and no year, usually rounded up.

So here is the actual state record, per school, with the growth numbers included rather than dropped.

The district, in numbers

Camden County Schools operates five schools serving 1,918 students, with 126.81 full-time-equivalent classroom teachers, per the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data for 2024–25.¹ That is a student-teacher ratio right around 15 to 1.

The five schools:

• Grandy Primary School
• Camden Intermediate School
• Camden Middle School
• Camden County High School
• Camden Early College High School

The district also runs a Career and Technical Education program and a United States Coast Guard Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps unit — the JROTC affiliation being a fairly direct expression of where this county sits, on the Pasquotank across from a Coast Guard air station.²

One district, five schools, eleven thousand county residents. There is no second district, no charter alternative inside the county, and no municipal school system, because there are no municipalities. If you are buying in Camden County and your child attends public school, they attend one of the five above.

NCDPI’s 2024–25 School Performance Grades, in full

North Carolina assigns every public school an annual School Performance Grade on an A–F scale, built from a 100-point score. Under the state’s formula that score is weighted 80 percent achievement and 20 percent growth. Separately, every school receives a growth designation — Exceeded, Met, or Not Met — measured by EVAAS, which estimates how much students progressed over the year relative to expectation.

Those two things measure genuinely different questions, and a school can score well on one and poorly on the other. Here is Camden’s full 2024–25 record.³

NCDPI 2024–25 School Performance Grades and EVAAS growth designations, from the state's own report-card data. Sorted by score, highest first. Grandy Primary's row carries no growth designation because primary grades below the state testing window do not generate one.

What is genuinely good here

Zero D or F schools, and no low-performing designation. In North Carolina, a school graded D or F and not exceeding growth is designated low-performing; a district where a majority of schools are low-performing is designated a low-performing district. Camden has neither. For a district this small, a clean sweep of A/B/C is a real result and not a rounding of one.

Camden Early College High School is the standout, and it is not close. A grade of A on a score of 91, with growth Exceeded at 96.3 — the school is performing at a high level and moving students further than expected. North Carolina’s early college model is a cooperative innovative high school where students take community college coursework alongside high school coursework, typically finishing with substantial transferable credit. Camden’s partners with College of The Albemarle. It admits by application rather than by attendance zone, so it is an option to pursue, not a school you buy your way into.

Camden County High School’s growth came back Met at 79.6. The comprehensive high school is holding its own — a B on a score of 70, with students progressing about as expected.

What the brochures leave out

Two schools came back growth Not Met. Camden Intermediate at 55.9 and Camden Middle at 62.6. Both still earned respectable performance grades, B and C — which is precisely the pattern worth understanding before you buy.

A high achievement score with a Not Met growth designation usually describes a school whose students arrive already testing well and leave testing about as well as they arrived. The absolute results look fine. The value the school is adding, as the state measures it, is below expectation. In a district with the household incomes this one has — a median of $91,078 in 2024 dollars across 2020–2024⁴ — a decent achievement score is partly a description of the families, not only of the schooling.

That is not an accusation. Growth indices bounce year to year in small schools, where a single grade-level cohort can swing the number, and two years of Not Met at a school with 300 students means something different than two years of Not Met at a school with 3,000. But it is the number to ask the principal about, and it is exactly the number a relocation guide built on an aggregator’s star rating will never show you.

The new high school project: in progress, and verify it yourself

Camden County has been building a new high school intended to bring Camden County High School and Camden Early College High School onto one shared campus.

I am going to be deliberately careful about the status.

Public project timelines for this facility have shifted, and the district’s own website continues to carry a dedicated “New High School Project” section.² I have not been able to confirm from a primary source, at the time of writing, whether the building is occupied, partially occupied, or still in construction. So this site does not tell you that Camden operates a unified high-school-and-early-college campus. It tells you there is a real, funded, substantially designed project intended to produce one, and that you should ask the district where it stands.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it does. “The high school and early college share a modern campus” and “the high school and early college are scheduled to share a campus” are different facts to buy a house on, and only one of them is currently supportable.

What this chapter does not claim

• No school ranking or percentile. You will find Camden described as “top 20 percent” or “9 out of 10” on aggregator sites. Those composites are built by third parties from public data with undisclosed weightings, and they are not the state’s judgment about these schools. The state’s judgment is the table above.
• No test-score trend line. One year of grades is what is published here, because one year of grades is what I verified. A three-year trend would be more useful and I do not have it sourced.
• No claim about class sizes, teacher retention, or individual programs beyond the CTE and JROTC offerings the district itself lists.