Cardinal Junior High

Located at 4045 Ashland Road, in Eldon, Iowa, Cardinal Junior High is an intimate junior high that caters to 314 students (grades 5 through 8), operated by Cardinal Comm School District. By comparison, Iowa's public schools average about 400 students each, so Cardinal Junior High sits 22% below that benchmark.

Across the 3 schools in Cardinal Comm School District (1,079 students total), Cardinal Junior High accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

In terms of who attends, Cardinal Junior High reports that 86% of students identify as White, making the school strongly White-majority. Beyond that, the school lists 8% Hispanic, 4% multiracial.

On the income-and-resources front, On paper, Cardinal Junior High has 18 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 17.8:1. That figure is higher than the state norm's 15.2:1 average. An estimated 61% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. That share is above Wapello County's rate of about 48%.

On a demographically-adjusted basis, Cardinal Junior High performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 61.5%, the actual is 70.9%, a residual of +9.4 points.

In the surrounding community, the surrounding county (Wapello County) shows that median household income runs about $64,766, 20% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and roughly 12% of residents live below the federal poverty line. Across Wapello County's 18 public schools (combined enrollment of about 6,892 students), Cardinal Junior High is one campus in the mix.

Cardinal High School is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.0 miles from this campus. 2 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Cardinal Junior High comes 1st of 7 in the immediate cluster, above the nearby-schools average of 54.5%.

Geographically, the school is in a small-town area.

Over the past 7-year window. Cardinal Junior High's enrollment has ticked up 29% since 2018, when it stood at 244 (now 314). The White share of enrollment contracted from 91% to 86% over that span. Class-load math has fell: from 19.3:1 in 2018 to 17.8:1 in 2025.

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