Manley Career Academy High School

Manley Career Academy High School, a very small high school in Chicago, Illinois, overseen by Chicago Public Schools Dist 299, hosts 193 students, covering grades 9 through 12. That puts it 77% leaner than the typical public school in Illinois, which averages around 834 students.

Chicago Public Schools Dist 299 comprises 622 schools with combined enrollment of 324,396 students; Manley Career Academy High School is among them.

On demographics, Manley Career Academy High School logs that 90% of students identify as Black, making the school strongly Black-majority. The remainder reads as 6% Hispanic, 2% White. That is noticeably more Black than the county at large, where the share is closer to 22%.

On the income-and-resources front, The school currently runs with 14 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 13.5:1. That tracks the state average closely. About 85% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. That share is noticeably above Cook County's rate of about 66%.

With demographic context factored in, Manley Career Academy High School falls in the UNDERPERFORMING tier of the BeatsExpectations residual. Given its student profile, a typical campus would land near 22.4%; this one comes in at 5.2%, -17.3 points off the demographic line.

Zooming out to the county, the surrounding county (Cook County) shows that median household earnings sit near $83,498, 43% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 10%. Across Cook County's 1406 public schools (combined enrollment of about 697,934 students), Manley Career Academy High School is one campus in the mix.

Kellman Corporate Community Elem is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.1 miles from this campus. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Manley Career Academy High School. On composite proficiency, Manley Career Academy High School comes 7th of 9 in the immediate cluster, below the nearby-schools average of 18.0%.

The school occupies a city-core site.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Manley Career Academy High School has ticked up 64%, going from 118 students in 2018 to 193 in 2025. Over the same period, the Black share edged down from 97% to 90%. Class-load math has rose: from 12.2:1 in 2018 to 13.5:1 in 2025.

In the discussion threads here, recent activity here tends to focus on open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.