Success Academy Primary School

As an average-sized elementary school in South Bend, Indiana, Success Academy Primary School enrolls 610 students from grades K through 5, operated by Success Academy Primary School. That puts it 40% bigger than the typical public school in Indiana, which averages around 436 students.

Operationally, Success Academy Primary School answers to Success Academy Primary School, which sets policy, hires staff, and reports enrollment to the state.

Looking at the student body, Success Academy Primary School logs that the most-represented group is Black (45%), with the rest of the student body spread across multiple groups; the rest looks like 24% White, 15% multiracial, 15% Hispanic. By comparison, St. Joseph County as a whole is about 13% Black, so the school skews meaningfully more Black than its surroundings.

On the resource side, Success Academy Primary School lists 34 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 17.9:1. That figure is higher than the state norm's 15.5:1 average. Roughly 76% of students at Success Academy Primary School qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. By comparison, St. Joseph County runs at roughly 46%, so the school's eligibility rate is meaningfully above the surrounding baseline.

With demographic context factored in, Success Academy Primary School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 22.1%, the actual is 18.2%, a residual of -3.8 points.

In the surrounding community, ACS estimates for St. Joseph County put the typical household earns roughly $66,868 per year, roughly 34% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 9%. Across St. Joseph County's 73 public schools (combined enrollment of about 35,614 students), Success Academy Primary School is one campus in the mix.

The closest other public school is Coquillard Elementary School, roughly 0.4 miles away. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Success Academy Primary School comes 3rd of 6 in the immediate cluster, below the nearby-schools average of 27.5%.

The school occupies a downtown site. Success Academy Primary School operates as a public charter school, meaning it is publicly funded but governed independently of the surrounding district's traditional schools.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count edged down 5%: 644 students in 2018 compared to 610 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share ticked down from 36% to 24%. Class-load math has grew: from 16.9:1 in 2018 to 17.9:1 in 2025.

On allk12, members of the Success Academy Primary School community share and discuss enrollment questions, classroom assignments, and PTA news. The community welcomes input from current and former families.