Northwest Elementary School

Northwest Elementary School is an elementary-level community of moderately sized scale in Ankeny, Iowa, overseen by Ankeny Comm School District, instructing 346 students in grades K through 5.

Within Ankeny Comm School District, which oversees 18 schools and 12,746 students, Northwest Elementary School is one campus in the system.

Looking at the student body, Northwest Elementary School lists that 65% of the student body identifies as White. The remainder consists of 16% Hispanic, 12% multiracial, 6% Black. The wider county runs roughly 76% White, putting the school's mix considerably less White than the area baseline.

On the resource side, Staff filings list 27 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 12.8:1 students per teacher. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 13.7:1 average. Around 37% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, 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 lower than the surrounding baseline.

On a demographically-adjusted basis, Northwest Elementary School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 73.3%, the actual is 70.2%, a residual of -3.1 points.

In the surrounding community, the surrounding county (Polk County) shows that the typical household earns roughly $83,576 per year, 40% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 7%. Northwest Elementary School is one of 137 public schools in Polk County (combined enrollment of about 77,436 students).

Nearest neighbor: Prairie Ridge Middle School, around 0.5 miles off. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Northwest Elementary School. On composite proficiency, Northwest Elementary School comes 8th of 8 in the immediate cluster, behind the nearby-schools average of 83.2%.

Northwest Elementary School operates from an outer-ring location.

Looking at the recent track record. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Northwest Elementary School has fell 5%, going from 366 students in 2018 to 346 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share shrank from 82% to 65%. The student-to-teacher ratio narrowed from 17.4:1 in 2018 to 12.8:1 today.

On allk12, recent activity here tends to focus on pickup logistics, teacher feedback, and after-school programs. Members of the school community can share what they know.