Viking School

Viking School operates as a medium-sized middle-grades school in Gurnee, Illinois, operated by Gurnee SD 56. Current enrollment sits at 461 students spanning grades 6 through 8.

Across the 4 schools in Gurnee SD 56 (1,836 students total), Viking School accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

For racial and ethnic makeup, Viking School reports that the largest single group is Hispanic at 47%, but no single group is in the majority. The remainder comes out to 23% Black, 19% White, 7% multiracial, 4% Asian. By comparison, Lake County as a whole is about 25% Hispanic, so the school skews considerably more Hispanic than its surroundings.

On the resource side, The school reports having 39 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 11.8:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 13.0:1 average. An estimated 54% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, On a poverty-adjusted basis, Viking School sits in the bottom 10% statewide. Predicted proficiency from the FRL regression is roughly 40.1%; actual is 22.1%, a gap of -18.0 points.

In the broader community, census data for Lake County shows the typical household earns roughly $110,416 per year, 48% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 6%. Across Lake County's 214 public schools (combined enrollment of about 118,032 students), Viking School is one campus in the mix.

River Trail School is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.6 miles from this campus. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Viking School comes 4th of 7 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 22.8%.

The school occupies an outer-ring site.

Over the past 7-year window. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Viking School has decreased 17%, going from 556 students in 2018 to 461 in 2025.

On this page, members of the Viking 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.