Horizon Elementary

Horizon Elementary is a well-populated elementary-level community in Johnston, Iowa, run under Johnston Comm School District. The school caters to 613 students in grades K through 5. By comparison, Iowa's public schools average about 325 students each, so Horizon Elementary sits 89% bigger than that benchmark.

Within Johnston Comm School District, which oversees 8 schools and 7,339 students, Horizon Elementary is one campus in the system.

On the student-mix side, Horizon Elementary reports that the largest single group is White, at 57% of enrollment; the rest looks like 16% Black, 12% Hispanic, 10% Asian, 6% multiracial. The wider county runs roughly 76% White, putting the school's mix visibly less White than the area baseline.

On the income-and-resources front, Staff filings list 44 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 13.9:1 students per teacher. That tracks the state average closely. An estimated 36% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. That share is noticeably below Polk County's rate of about 49%.

With demographic context factored in, Horizon Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 74.0%, the actual is 74.0%, a residual of +0.0 points.

In the broader community, community-level numbers for Polk County indicate the typical household earns roughly $83,576 per year, about 40% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 7%. Across Polk County's 137 public schools (combined enrollment of about 77,436 students), Horizon Elementary is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Summit Middle School, around 0.2 miles off. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Horizon Elementary. On composite proficiency, Horizon Elementary comes 6th of 8 in the immediate cluster, below the nearby-schools average of 79.3%.

The campus sits in a suburban setting.

Over the past 7-year window. Horizon Elementary's enrollment has decreased 10% since 2018, when it stood at 684 (now 613). White enrollment moved from 69% to 57% across the same window. The student-to-teacher ratio fell from 16.4:1 in 2018 to 13.9:1 today.

Inside the community feed, members of the Horizon Elementary community share and discuss sports schedules, lunch menu changes, and school spirit week. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.