Schmid Elem School

Schmid Elem School is a K-5 school of intimate scale in Chicago, Illinois, run under Chicago Public Schools Dist 299, caters to 195 students in grades pre-K through 8. That puts it 49% smaller than the typical public school in Illinois, which averages around 381 students.

Chicago Public Schools Dist 299 runs 622 schools in total, collectively educating 324,396 students. Schmid Elem School is one of those campuses.

In terms of who attends, Schmid Elem School reports that 92% of students identify as Black, making the school strongly Black-majority. Other groups include 6% Hispanic. That is meaningfully more Black than the county at large, where the share is closer to 22%.

On the resource side, The school lists 25 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 7.8:1. The state averages around 13.9:1, so this campus is tighter than the state norm typical. Around 98% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, often used as a Title I proxy. Set against Cook County (around 66%), the school's rate is north of typical.

On a demographically-adjusted basis, Schmid Elem School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 14.9%, the actual is 15.6%, a residual of +0.6 points.

In the surrounding community, community-level numbers for Cook County indicate 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%. Schmid Elem School is one of 1406 public schools in Cook County (combined enrollment of about 697,934 students).

YCCS-Olive Harvey Mid College HS is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.5 miles from this campus. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Schmid Elem School comes 5th of 9 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 20.3%.

The school occupies a city-core site.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count grew 5%: 186 students in 2018 compared to 195 in 2025. Black enrollment moved from 98% to 92% across the same window. Class-load math has narrowed: from 13.4:1 in 2018 to 7.8:1 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. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.