Fairmeadows Elementary School

Located at 807 23rd St, in West Des Moines, Iowa, Fairmeadows Elementary School is a high-enrollment K-5 school that instructs 542 students (grades pre-K through 6), operated by West Des Moines Comm School District. That puts it 67% bigger than the typical public school in Iowa, which averages around 325 students.

Fairmeadows Elementary School is one of 13 schools operated by West Des Moines Comm School District, a district that serves 9,009 students overall.

On demographics, Fairmeadows Elementary School shows that 63% of the student body identifies as White. The remainder comes out to 15% Hispanic, 9% Black, 8% multiracial, 5% Asian. The wider county runs roughly 76% White, putting the school's mix considerably less White than the area baseline.

On the income-and-resources front, The school lists 34 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 15.9:1. That figure is higher than the state norm's 13.7:1 average. An estimated 44% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Fairmeadows Elementary School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 70.2%, the actual is 72.3%, a residual of +2.1 points.

In the surrounding community, the surrounding county (Polk County) reports that median household earnings sit near $83,576, 40% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 7%. In all, Polk County runs 137 public schools (combined enrollment of about 77,436 students), of which Fairmeadows Elementary School is one.

The closest other public school is Stilwell Junior High School, roughly 0.6 miles away. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Fairmeadows Elementary School comes 5th of 8 in the immediate cluster, ahead of the nearby-schools average of 71.8%.

Fairmeadows Elementary School operates from a downtown location.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Fairmeadows Elementary School has edged down 4%, going from 566 students in 2018 to 542 in 2025. White enrollment moved from 76% to 63% across the same window.

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