Clay City Elem School

Set in Clay City, Illinois, Clay City Elem School is an one-room-style primary school, run under Clay City CUSD 10. It instructs 125 students across grades pre-K through 5. By comparison, Illinois's public schools average about 381 students each, so Clay City Elem School sits 67% below that benchmark.

Across the 3 schools in Clay City CUSD 10 (253 students total), Clay City Elem School accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

On demographics, Clay City Elem School records that 97% of students identify as White, making the school strongly White-majority; the rest looks like 3% multiracial. That mix tracks the wider county fairly closely.

On the resource side, On paper, Clay City Elem School has 13 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 9.5:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 13.9:1 average. An estimated 59% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly cited indicator of low-income enrollment.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Clay City Elem School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 37.3%, the actual is 27.3%, a residual of -10.1 points.

Around the school, ACS estimates for Clay County put the typical household earns roughly $60,417 per year, roughly 13% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 11%. In all, Clay County runs 8 public schools (combined enrollment of about 2,130 students), of which Clay City Elem School is one.

The closest other public school is Clay City Jr High School, roughly 0.0 miles away. Counting just inside five miles, 2 other public schools cluster around Clay City Elem School. On composite proficiency, Clay City Elem School comes 7th of 9 in the immediate cluster, behind the nearby-schools average of 37.2%.

Geographically, the school is in a countryside area.

Over the past 7-year window. Over the past 7-year window, the student count declined 38%: 201 students in 2018 compared to 125 in 2025. The student-to-teacher ratio pulled in from 13.1:1 in 2018 to 9.5:1 today.

On this page, members of the Clay City Elem School community share and discuss open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.