Forsyth County schools earn strong Georgia climate ratings across district

Forsyth County schools posted strong marks in Georgia’s latest climate ratings, with every campus scoring 3.75 or higher and many earning a perfect 5 out of 5. The district said the results reflect how students experience school each day through engagement, safety, attendance, discipline and overall climate across 42 schools serving more than 54,000 students.

The ratings matter because Georgia uses School Climate Star Ratings as a diagnostic tool in its College and Career Ready Performance Index, not as a punitive measure. For the 2024-2025 school year, the state treated the ratings as a hold harmless year, meaning the results should not be used for accountability decisions, consequences or direct comparisons with prior years. That makes the district’s strong showing a useful snapshot, but not a clean apples-to-apples ranking against earlier climate reports.

The scorecard is built from four domains: attendance, a safe and substance-free environment, discipline and the school climate survey. Georgia also revised the calculation guide for 2024-2025 to improve precision, fairness and interpretability, and the climate survey system changed as new surveys for students, teachers, staff and families replaced older instruments. Forsyth County Schools said its system includes students from 129 different countries who speak 69 languages, which makes climate data especially important in a district where a single measure has to reflect a large and diverse school community.

The numbers also sit alongside other signs that the experience on the ground is more complicated than a star rating alone can show. Recent reporting has said disciplinary incidents in Forsyth County K-12 schools increased in 2025 even as enrollment fell, a reminder that a strong districtwide score does not necessarily mean every school, grade level or hallway feels the same to families. For parents, the key question is whether the broad marks line up with what children see every day in classrooms, cafeterias and buses, especially in a county that is still growing and adjusting to shifting enrollment patterns.

Superintendent Dr. Mitch Young said the ratings reflect the positive culture schools work to build every day and credited collaboration among schools, parents and the broader community. In a county of 54,864 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, those ratings give Forsyth another positive headline heading into summer planning, while also setting a baseline for how schools will be measured as the state’s updated climate system takes hold.