Franklin's 29-Point Climb: From 56% to 85% in Five Years

Wed, 06 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2020, Franklin graduated 56.3 percent of its senior class. More students failed to finish on time than succeeded. For a small mill city in central New Hampshire — median household income roughly $62,000, about half the income of the affluent suburbs an hour south — it was a number that confirmed every assumption about what poverty and resource constraints do to educational outcomes.

Five years later, Franklin graduated 84.8 percent.

The 28.5-point improvement is the largest sustained turnaround of any traditional public school district in New Hampshire. It is not a one-year spike; Franklin has posted three consecutive years of improvement and has now exceeded its 2015 starting point of 67.8 percent by 17 points.

The Trajectory

Franklin's graduation rate reads like a district that hit bottom, briefly bounced, slipped again, and then climbed steadily:

2015: 67.8 percent. 2016: 76.8. 2017: 76.3. Then a slide to 67.9 in 2018 and 75.0 in 2019, followed by the 56.3 percent nadir in 2020. The Class of 2021 jumped to 85.2 percent before the rate fell back to 67.2 in 2022, the second-lowest mark of the decade.

What followed is the part that matters: 75.4 percent in 2023, 81.0 in 2024, and 84.8 in 2025. Three consecutive years of improvement, each step large enough to be meaningful even in a district with a small cohort.

Small Numbers, Real Gains

Franklin's 2025 graduating class had 66 students. In a cohort that size, every student matters enormously, and a single additional graduate moves the rate by about 1.5 percentage points. The small-N reality means Franklin's rate will always be volatile, and a future dip should not be read as the end of the turnaround.

But the three-year streak matters precisely because it spans multiple cohorts. The 2023, 2024, and 2025 classes each graduated at progressively higher rates, suggesting that whatever changed in Franklin is structural rather than cohort-specific.

The Context

Franklin is not the only small district that has staged a comeback. Pittsfield climbed from 53.8 percent in 2022 to 81.1 percent in 2025, a 27.2-point improvement. Moultonborough went from 75.9 percent to 100 percent. But Franklin's turnaround is the most dramatic because of the depth of the trough and the length of the recovery.

The district's challenges are well-documented. Franklin's per-pupil spending is constrained by a tax base with limited commercial property. Its student population reflects the economic realities of a post-industrial community in northern New England. That this district went from graduating barely half its seniors to graduating nearly 85 percent — in the same five years that affluent suburbs like Bedford and Londonderry were declining — is a result that deserves attention.

Staying, Not Finishing

Franklin's dropout rate has moved alongside its graduation rate, spiking to 12.7 percent in the 2020 trough year and 10.4 percent in 2022, then easing to 3.2 percent in 2024 and 4.5 percent in 2025. The pattern suggests the district's challenge was never only about students leaving outright. Many students stayed enrolled but did not finish on time, and the recent recovery reflects both fewer departures and more on-time completions.

The graduation data does not reveal what Franklin changed. Small districts rarely have the resources for the kind of programmatic overhauls that make for clean narratives. The improvement could reflect better credit-recovery options, tighter attendance tracking, more flexible pathways to completion, or some combination.

Franklin did not respond to a request for comment.

Data Source

This analysis uses four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate data from the New Hampshire Department of Education, covering the graduating classes of 2015 through 2025.