Jefferson Elem School

Jefferson Elem School operates as a tight-knit primary school in Harvard, Illinois, one of the schools within Harvard CUSD 50. Current enrollment sits at 319 students spanning grades 4 through 5.

Harvard CUSD 50 comprises 5 schools with combined enrollment of 2,532 students; Jefferson Elem School is among them.

On the student-mix side, Jefferson Elem School lists that 74% of the student body identifies as Hispanic; the rest looks like 24% White. That is meaningfully more Hispanic than the county at large, where the share is closer to 16%.

On the income-and-resources front, On paper, Jefferson Elem School has 34 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 9.4:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 13.9:1 average. Roughly 55% of students at Jefferson Elem School qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly cited indicator of low-income enrollment. By comparison, McHenry County runs at roughly 35%, so the school's eligibility rate is higher than the surrounding baseline.

On a residual basis (actual vs predicted given the student mix), Jefferson Elem School falls in the UNDERPERFORMING tier of the BeatsExpectations residual. Given its student profile, a typical campus would land near 39.5%; this one comes in at 18.6%, -20.8 points off the demographic line.

In the surrounding community, McHenry County reports that median household income runs about $104,802, roughly 35% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 4%. Jefferson Elem School is one of 89 public schools in McHenry County (combined enrollment of about 50,123 students).

The closest other public school is Harvard High School, roughly 0.1 miles away. Within five miles, there are 4 other public schools. Among the 8 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), Jefferson Elem School ranks 7th on composite proficiency, below the local average of 34.5%.

The campus sits in a town-center setting.

Looking at the recent track record. Over the past 7-year window, the student count contracted 24%: 422 students in 2018 compared to 319 in 2025. Hispanic enrollment moved from 68% to 74% across the same window. The student-to-teacher ratio narrowed from 12.8:1 in 2018 to 9.4:1 today.

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