North Carolina released its 2025-26 school performance grades on September 2, and Union County Public Schools finished first among all 115 districts in the state for the second year in a row. Just under 74 percent of its students scored proficient or better on state exams, which is more than 14 points above the state average. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools posted its second straight year of gains at the same time, and its graduation rate climbed to 87.9 percent.
Those are district numbers. The house you buy is not zoned to a district average. It is zoned to one elementary, one middle, and one high school, and the grades underneath that county headline run from a 96 down to a 57. Below are the 2026 Union County NC school ratings alongside the Charlotte-Mecklenburg grades, school by school, for Weddington, Waxhaw, Marvin, Indian Trail, Monroe, Matthews, and Ballantyne, what the letter actually measures, and the three things that catch out-of-state buyers off guard.
13 min read | By Steve Jarrell, The Longleaf Group at eXp Realty | Updated September 2026
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What This Guide Covers
- How Union County ranked in the 2026 state results
- What a North Carolina school performance grade actually measures
- Union County NC school ratings in Weddington, Waxhaw, and Marvin
- Indian Trail and Monroe schools
- Matthews and Ballantyne: how the CMS schools scored
- Why can’t you compare these grades to Fort Mill and Indian Land?
- What the Union County NC school ratings change for buyers
- Frequently asked questions
How Union County Ranked in the 2026 State Results
Union County Public Schools finished first among North Carolina’s 115 school districts in overall student proficiency for the second consecutive year, so if you have been told the schools are the reason people move here, the state data backs that up at the county level. The district reported 73.8 percent of students scoring proficient or better in 2025-26, up 3.1 points from 70.7 percent the year before. The statewide figure was 59.2 percent. UCPS also posted a 93.4 percent four-year graduation rate, its highest on record, against a state rate of 88.8 percent.
The Short Answer
Union County Public Schools ranked first in North Carolina for the second year running, but the grades of individual schools inside the county range from A to C. Your address, not the county ranking, decides which one your home is assigned to.
Key numbers right now:
- Union County proficiency: 73.8% (state: 59.2%)
- Charlotte-Mecklenburg proficiency: 60.9%, up 5.1 points
- UCPS schools graded A or B: 33 of 50
- UCPS low-performing schools: 3, down from 5
- Highest local score: Marvin Ridge High, 96
- UCPS graduation rate: 93.4% (state: 88.8%)
The spread inside the county is the part that matters when you’re choosing a street. Marvin Ridge High graded a 96 this year. Monroe High graded a 57. Both are Union County Public Schools, both sit inside the district that just finished first in the state, and 39 points separate them. A county ranking is a useful starting point and a poor substitute for looking up the actual address.
Two Union County schools moved off the state’s low-performing list this year, East Elementary and Monroe High, dropping the district’s count from five to three. None of the three sit in Weddington, Waxhaw, Marvin, Indian Trail, or Wesley Chapel. You can read the district’s own summary in the UCPS results release, and the statewide picture in the NC Department of Public Instruction announcement.
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What a North Carolina School Performance Grade Actually Measures
A North Carolina school performance grade is 80 percent test achievement and 20 percent student growth, converted to a 100-point scale. The letter breaks on a 15-point scale set in state law: A is 85 to 100, B is 70 to 84, C is 55 to 69, D is 40 to 54, and F is anything under 40. That weighting is the single most useful thing to understand before you read another word of this page.
Because achievement carries four times the weight of growth, the letter you see tracks how students in a school were already performing far more closely than it tracks how much that school moved them during the year. Two Union County schools show what that does in practice. Waxhaw Elementary exceeded its growth target this year and still graded a B, because its achievement score held it down. Cuthbertson Middle did not meet growth and rose from a B to an A, because its achievement score is high.
Neither result is a scandal. It is the formula working as written. But it means a C school is not automatically a school where less teaching is happening, and an A school is not automatically the one adding the most to a given student. If growth is what you care about, look at the growth status column rather than the letter on the front.
Statewide, 2,585 schools received a grade this year, and I would treat the growth column as the more interesting half of any school you are seriously considering. Of those, 233 earned an A and 693 earned a B, so about 36 percent of North Carolina schools landed in the top two bands, up from roughly 28 percent last year. The number of schools designated low-performing fell to 523 from 685. You can look up any individual school on the state’s School Performance Grades dashboard.
Union County NC School Ratings in Weddington, Waxhaw, and Marvin
Every school serving Weddington, Marvin, and the Marvin Ridge and Cuthbertson zones of Waxhaw graded an A or a B in 2025-26, and Marvin Ridge High posted the highest score in South Charlotte at 96. Two schools moved up a letter this year and one moved down. Grades and growth status below come from the NC DPI school performance grade dataset for 2025-26, so find your zone in the table and read across.
| School | 2026 Grade | Score | Proficient | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marvin Ridge High | A | 96 | 94.8% | Exceeded |
| Weddington High | A | 92 | 91.8% | Met |
| Weddington Elementary | A | 91 | 90.5% | Exceeded |
| Marvin Ridge Middle | A | 91 | 91.5% | Exceeded |
| Weddington Middle | A | 90 | 90.5% | Exceeded |
| Antioch Elementary | A | 90 | 90.2% | Exceeded |
| Cuthbertson High | A | 90 | 85.6% | Exceeded |
| Marvin Elementary | A | 90 | 90.9% | Exceeded |
| Rea View Elementary | A | 90 | 90.9% | Exceeded |
| Sandy Ridge Elementary | A | 90 | 90.7% | Exceeded |
| Kensington Elementary | A | 86 | 85.4% | Exceeded (up from B) |
| Cuthbertson Middle | A | 85 | 88.7% | Not Met (up from B) |
| New Town Elementary | B | 83 | 85.7% | Met (down from A) |
| Waxhaw Elementary | B | 72 | 66.8% | Exceeded |
Two of those are new this year. If you ruled out a zone on last year’s letter, look again at Kensington Elementary in Waxhaw and at Cuthbertson Middle, which both climbed from a B to an A. New Town Elementary slipped the other way, from an A at 86 to a B at 83, which is a three-point move and not the kind of swing worth reorganizing a home search around. Single-year movement of a few points is normal in this data.
Weddington and Marvin are the tightest cluster you will find on the board. All four schools serving Weddington graded an A with proficiency between 90.2 and 91.8 percent, which is why homes inside those zones have historically drawn buyers who are shopping the assignment as much as the house. If you’re deciding between specific communities inside those boundaries, I’ve mapped which neighborhoods feed which schools in the Waxhaw school district neighborhood guide and in Best Neighborhoods in Weddington NC.
Wesley Chapel is the case that confuses people most. It is a Union County village whose homes split between the Weddington and Cuthbertson attendance zones depending on the street, so two houses a few minutes apart can feed different high schools. That one is worth reading in detail before you tour, and I broke it down in Wesley Chapel NC school zoning.
Indian Trail and Monroe Schools
Indian Trail and Monroe schools graded mostly Bs in 2025-26, with one C in each town, and if you looked at these towns last year you should know both Indian Trail high schools improved. Sun Valley High made the largest single jump of any school in this guide, moving from a C at 67 to a B at 76. Monroe High exited the state’s low-performing list entirely, rising from a D at 51 to a C at 57.
| School | 2026 Grade | Score | Proficient | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Porter Ridge High (Indian Trail) | B | 80 | 73.6% | Exceeded |
| Piedmont High (Monroe) | B | 79 | 70.7% | Exceeded |
| Sun Valley Middle (Indian Trail) | B | 77 | 72.9% | Exceeded |
| Sun Valley High (Indian Trail) | B | 76 | 62.1% | Met (up from C) |
| Parkwood High (Monroe) | B | 76 | 65.3% | Exceeded |
| Porter Ridge Middle (Indian Trail) | C | 65 | 68.5% | Not Met |
| Monroe High (Monroe) | C | 57 | 36.9% | Met (exited low-performing) |
Here’s the tradeoff nobody puts in a listing. Indian Trail and Monroe are where your money buys the most house per dollar in Union County, and they are also where the school grades sit a band below Weddington and Marvin. That is a real choice, not a trap. A B-rated high school in Indian Trail is above the state average on proficiency, and a buyer who needs more square footage or a shorter price tag is trading a letter grade for something they may value more. What matters is making the trade on purpose. If Indian Trail is on your list, the full picture is in my Indian Trail schools guide.
One more thing about Monroe High’s number. Its proficiency figure of 36.9 percent is the lowest in this guide by a wide margin, and its C grade came alongside a Met growth status. The school moved up a full letter in one year. Whether that continues is worth watching if you’re buying in central Monroe, and it is the kind of trend a single year of data cannot settle.
Matthews and Ballantyne: How the CMS Schools Scored
Matthews and Ballantyne are not in Union County. If your search spans both sides of that county line, you are comparing two separate districts, and everything above stops applying the moment you cross it. Both towns sit in Mecklenburg County and are served by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which sets its own boundaries, its own calendar, and its own assignment rules. CMS as a whole graded well below Union County at 60.9 percent proficiency, but the south Mecklenburg schools serving Ballantyne are among the strongest in the district. Here is how they scored.
| School | 2026 Grade | Score | Proficient | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Providence High | A | 95 | 92.1% | South Charlotte |
| Ardrey Kell High | A | 92 | 85.5% | Ballantyne |
| Providence Spring Elementary | A | 92 | 93.9% | South Charlotte |
| Hawk Ridge Elementary | A | 91 | 88.8% | Ballantyne |
| Polo Ridge Elementary | A | 90 | 89.9% | Ballantyne |
| Ballantyne Elementary | A | 87 | 83.5% | Ballantyne |
| Community House Middle | A | 86 | 85.3% | Ballantyne |
| Elizabeth Lane Elementary | A | 85 | 82.1% | Matthews |
| Matthews Elementary | B | 83 | 79.9% | Matthews |
| Ballantyne Ridge High | B | 79 | Not listed | Ballantyne (up from C) |
| Butler High | B | 78 | 66.4% | Matthews |
| Crestdale Middle | B | 74 | 71.7% | Matthews (up from C) |
There’s a change in Ballantyne this year that no dataset will flag for you. Cato Ridge Middle School opened on Camp Verde Lane in August 2026 to relieve crowding at Community House Middle, Jay M. Robinson Middle, and Rea Farms STEAM Academy. That means Community House Middle’s attendance boundary is different this school year than it was last year, and its A grade of 86 reflects the old, larger boundary. Cato Ridge will not receive a performance grade of its own until the 2026-27 results come out in the fall of 2027.
If you’re weighing Ballantyne against a Union County town, the district difference reaches past school grades into property taxes and lot sizes, and I compared the two directly in Ballantyne vs Weddington NC. I also walk through why picking a neighborhood before you understand the assignment map is the most expensive order to do this in, in my video Moving to South Charlotte NC? Don’t Choose a Neighborhood Yet.
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Book a 15-minute call →Why Can’t You Compare These Grades to Fort Mill and Indian Land?
Because South Carolina uses a completely different system, and the report card you can pull today is a year older than North Carolina’s. Fort Mill and Indian Land sit in South Carolina, in the Fort Mill School District and the Lancaster County School District. Neither appears anywhere in the North Carolina data on this page, and there is no formula that converts one to the other.
South Carolina rates individual schools Excellent, Good, Average, Below Average, or Unsatisfactory. At the elementary and middle level those ratings give academic achievement 35 points and student progress 35 points out of 100, so growth carries equal weight with test scores. North Carolina gives growth 20 percent. A school that moves students a long way from a lower starting point can rate well in South Carolina and still earn a C in North Carolina, because the two states are measuring partly different things.
The timing gap matters just as much. North Carolina published its 2025-26 grades on September 2, 2026. South Carolina’s most recent report cards came out on November 3, 2025, and they cover the 2024-25 school year. So from about September through November each year, a buyer comparing Ballantyne to Fort Mill is holding a current North Carolina number against a South Carolina number that is a full year old. South Carolina’s next release is expected in the fall, and no date has been announced.
South Carolina also does not assign an overall rating to a district at all. Only individual schools get one. Anyone who tells you a South Carolina district is “rated Excellent” is describing something the state does not publish. What Fort Mill can accurately claim from its 2024-25 report cards is that all three of its high schools and all six of its middle schools rated Excellent, and that its on-time graduation rate of 95.9 percent was the highest among traditional high schools in the state. Those are school-level and district-reported figures, and I keep the detail current in my Fort Mill SC schools guide.
What the Union County NC School Ratings Change for Buyers
For most buyers, the 2026 Union County NC school ratings change your shortlist at the margins rather than your whole plan. The schools that graded A last year graded A again. The movement happened in the middle of the range, where Sun Valley High, Crestdale Middle, Kensington Elementary, and Cuthbertson Middle each climbed a letter, and Monroe High came off the low-performing list. If one of those was the reason a town got cut from your list a year ago, it is worth a second look.
The bigger point is structural. Union County assigns students to a home school based on where the parent lives, and it organizes into nine secondary school clusters with designated feeder elementaries. There is a School Choice lottery that permits transfers into schools running below 85 percent capacity, and a separate student transfer process that depends on space. Those two doors exist, and neither one is something to count on when you’re choosing a house. The district publishes its attendance and boundary maps online, and its own address lookup tool is still listed as coming soon, so for now the maps and a call to the school’s data manager are how you confirm an assignment.
If a school zone is part of why you’re buying a particular house, confirm the assignment with the district before you go under contract, not after. Listing remarks and third-party portals both carry school fields that get typed in by hand and go stale the moment a boundary moves. The district is the only source that counts. Cato Ridge Middle opening in Ballantyne this August is a live example of how fast a boundary that held for years can change.
One last thing that trips people up, and it has nothing to do with any of the numbers above. The consumer-facing NC School Report Cards website, the one you land on if you Google “North Carolina school report card,” was still displaying 2024-25 results as of the first week of September 2026. The 2025-26 grades in this guide come from the state’s accountability datasets and its performance grade dashboard, which updated first. If you check a school yourself and the number does not match what you read here, check the school year label on the page you’re looking at before you assume one of us is wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions About Union County NC School Ratings
Which school district is Waxhaw NC in?
Waxhaw is served by Union County Public Schools, not Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. You will see this confuse people because many Union County homes carry a Charlotte-area mailing address and sit minutes from the Mecklenburg County line. Weddington, Marvin, Wesley Chapel, Indian Trail, Stallings, and Monroe are also Union County Public Schools. Matthews, Mint Hill, and Ballantyne are Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
Did Union County schools rank number one in North Carolina in 2026?
Yes. Union County Public Schools finished first among North Carolina’s 115 districts in overall student proficiency for the 2025-26 school year, its second consecutive year at the top. The district reported 73.8 percent proficiency against a state figure of 59.2 percent, and a 93.4 percent four-year graduation rate.
What is a good school performance grade in North Carolina?
North Carolina uses a 15-point scale set in state law. An A is a score of 85 to 100, a B is 70 to 84, a C is 55 to 69, a D is 40 to 54, and an F is below 40. About 36 percent of the 2,585 graded schools in the state earned an A or a B this year. When you read one of these letters, remember the score is 80 percent test achievement and only 20 percent student growth, so it reflects starting point as much as classroom progress.
Are Marvin Ridge and Cuthbertson part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools?
No. Marvin Ridge High, Marvin Ridge Middle, Marvin Elementary, Cuthbertson High, and Cuthbertson Middle are all Union County Public Schools. Marvin Ridge High posted the highest 2025-26 performance score in this guide at 96, with 94.8 percent of students proficient.
Can I choose which Union County school my child attends?
Union County assigns a home school based on the address where the parent lives. The district also runs a School Choice lottery for transfers into schools operating below 85 percent capacity, and a separate student transfer process that depends on available space. Both are applications rather than guarantees, so buyers who need a specific school should buy inside that school’s boundary rather than plan on a transfer.
Do Fort Mill and Indian Land schools have letter grades?
No. South Carolina rates schools Excellent, Good, Average, Below Average, or Unsatisfactory instead of using letters, and it weights student progress far more heavily than North Carolina does. South Carolina also releases its report cards about two months later each year, so its published data is usually a year behind North Carolina’s during the fall.
About the Author
Steve Jarrell is a REALTOR and team lead of The Longleaf Group at eXp Realty, licensed in both North Carolina and South Carolina, which is why school questions on both sides of the state line land on his desk. He lives in Weddington, inside the Union County attendance zones covered in this guide, and he and his wife Amanda lead the team together. Before real estate, Steve joined VisualTour as President, led its rebrand to Paradym, and took the company through its acquisition by Constellation Software in 2020, a background in reading and structuring real estate data that shows up in guides like this one.
He tracks the Union County NC school ratings and the CMS grades every year as they are released, because school assignment drives more South Charlotte buying decisions than any other single factor. The Longleaf Group is an eXp ICON Team with 140+ Five-Star Reviews across South Charlotte. Reach the team at 704-228-2732 or steve@jarrellhomes.com.