Four Mile Elementary

Set in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, Four Mile Elementary is a sprawling elementary-level community, overseen by Southeast Polk Comm School District. It teaches 495 students across grades pre-K through 5. That puts it 52% larger than the typical public school in Iowa, which averages around 325 students.

Four Mile Elementary is one of 10 schools operated by Southeast Polk Comm School District, a district that works with 6,359 students overall.

In terms of who attends, Four Mile Elementary reports that 70% of the student body identifies as White. Beyond that, the school logs 13% Hispanic, 5% Asian, 5% multiracial, 5% Black.

On the income-and-resources front, Four Mile Elementary shows 36 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 13.9:1. That tracks the state average closely. About 38% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. By comparison, Polk County runs at roughly 49%, so the school's eligibility rate is somewhat below the surrounding baseline.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Four Mile Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 73.0%, the actual is 77.3%, a residual of +4.3 points.

In the surrounding community, ACS estimates for Polk County put the typical household earns roughly $83,576 per year, about 40% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and roughly 7% of residents live below the federal poverty line. Across Polk County's 137 public schools (combined enrollment of about 77,436 students), Four Mile Elementary is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Southeast Polk High School, around 1.9 miles off. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. Among the 8 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), Four Mile Elementary ranks 2nd on composite proficiency, above the local average of 56.4%.

The school occupies an outlying site.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Four Mile Elementary has grew 15%, going from 430 students in 2018 to 495 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share shrank from 82% to 70%. Class-load math has fell: from 15.4:1 in 2018 to 13.9:1 in 2025.

Within the allk12 community for this school, recent activity here tends to focus on open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.