Higgins Elem Community Academy

Higgins Elem Community Academy operates as a modestly sized primary school in Chicago, Illinois, run under Chicago Public Schools Dist 299. Current enrollment sits at 271 students spanning grades pre-K through 8. That puts it 29% below the typical public school in Illinois, which averages around 381 students.

Chicago Public Schools Dist 299 comprises 622 schools with combined enrollment of 324,396 students; Higgins Elem Community Academy is among them.

For racial and ethnic makeup, Higgins Elem Community Academy logs that 90% of students identify as Black, making the school strongly Black-majority; the rest consists of 9% Hispanic. The wider county runs roughly 22% Black, putting the school's mix meaningfully more Black than the area baseline.

In terms of school funding signals, Staff filings list 23 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 11.8:1 students per teacher. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 13.9:1 average. About 94% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, often used as a Title I proxy. That share is noticeably above Cook County's rate of about 66%.

On a residual basis (actual vs predicted given the student mix), Higgins Elem Community Academy performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 17.2%, the actual is 19.9%, a residual of +2.7 points.

In the area at large, census data for Cook County shows the typical household earns roughly $83,498 per year, about 43% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 10%. Across Cook County's 1406 public schools (combined enrollment of about 697,934 students), Higgins Elem Community Academy is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Whistler Elem School, around 0.5 miles off. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Higgins Elem Community Academy comes 5th of 7 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 21.3%.

Geographically, the school is in an inner-city area.

Five-year trend. Higgins Elem Community Academy's enrollment has remained close to its prior level since 2018, when it stood at 270 (now 271). Hispanic enrollment moved from 2% to 9% across the same window. Class-load math has tightened: from 20.0:1 in 2018 to 11.8:1 in 2025.

In the discussion threads here, the page collects discussion, questions, and updates around enrollment questions, classroom assignments, and PTA news. The community welcomes input from current and former families.