Woodlawn Elem Community School

Woodlawn Elem Community School is a compact K-5 school in Chicago, Illinois, operated by Chicago Public Schools Dist 299. The school works with 167 students in grades pre-K through 6. That puts it 56% leaner than the typical public school in Illinois, which averages around 381 students.

Woodlawn Elem Community School is one of 622 schools operated by Chicago Public Schools Dist 299, a district that serves 324,396 students overall.

On the student-mix side, Woodlawn Elem Community School reports that 96% of students identify as Black, making the school strongly Black-majority. Other groups include 4% Hispanic. That is meaningfully more Black than the county at large, where the share is closer to 22%.

Looking at the economic backdrop, On paper, Woodlawn Elem Community School has 15 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 11.1:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 13.9:1 average. Around 89% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. Set against Cook County (around 66%), the school's rate is noticeably above typical.

On a residual basis (actual vs predicted given the student mix), Woodlawn Elem Community School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 20.0%, the actual is 27.2%, a residual of +7.2 points.

In the area at large, ACS estimates for Cook County put the typical household earns roughly $83,498 per year, roughly 43% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 10%. In all, Cook County runs 1406 public schools (combined enrollment of about 697,934 students), of which Woodlawn Elem Community School is one.

Nearest neighbor: Wadsworth Elem School, around 0.4 miles off. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. Among the 9 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), Woodlawn Elem Community School ranks 3rd on composite proficiency, above the local average of 17.4%.

Geographically, the school is in a metropolitan area.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count declined 22%: 213 students in 2018 compared to 167 in 2025. The student-to-teacher ratio narrowed from 21.5:1 in 2018 to 11.1:1 today.

On this page, members of the Woodlawn Elem Community 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.