Hoyt Middle School

As a middle-of-the-pack intermediate school in Des Moines, Iowa, Hoyt Middle School serves 455 students from grades 6 through 8, one of the schools within Des Moines Independent Comm School District.

Hoyt Middle School is one of 59 schools operated by Des Moines Independent Comm School District, a district that serves 29,676 students overall.

On the student-mix side, Hoyt Middle School shows that the most-represented group is White (38%), with the rest of the student body spread across multiple groups. Beyond that, the school records 32% Hispanic, 18% Black, 5% multiracial, 5% Asian. That is considerably less White than the county at large, where the share is closer to 76%.

On the income-and-resources front, Hoyt Middle School logs 29 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 15.8:1. That tracks the state average closely. Roughly 83% of students at Hoyt Middle School qualify 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 above the surrounding baseline.

On a residual basis (actual vs predicted given the student mix), Hoyt Middle School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 50.6%, the actual is 42.8%, a residual of -7.8 points.

Around the school, community-level numbers for Polk County indicate median household income runs about $83,576, 40% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, 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), Hoyt Middle School is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Brubaker Elementary School, around 0.1 miles off. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Hoyt Middle School comes 5th of 8 in the immediate cluster, below the nearby-schools average of 49.1%.

Geographically, the school is in a metropolitan area.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count declined 24%: 598 students in 2018 compared to 455 in 2025. The White share of enrollment shrank from 51% to 38% over that span.

On this page, the page collects discussion, questions, and updates around classroom updates, athletics, and weather closures. Members of the school community can share what they know.