Great Oaks High School and Career Center

Great Oaks High School and Career Center is a rural-scale high school in Des Moines, Iowa, operated by Charter Organization: Oakmont Education. The school works with 72 students in grades 9 through 12. That puts it 85% smaller than the typical public school in Iowa, which averages around 468 students.

Great Oaks High School and Career Center sits inside Charter Organization: Oakmont Education, the local public-school operator responsible for the campus.

Demographically, Great Oaks High School and Career Center lists that the most-represented group is Black (38%), with the rest of the student body spread across multiple groups. The remainder is composed of 32% White, 29% Hispanic. That is noticeably more Black than the county at large, where the share is closer to 7%.

Looking at school resources, Staff filings list 3 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 24.2:1 students per teacher. That figure is higher than the state norm's 17.3:1 average. About 4% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. That share is lower than Polk County's rate of about 49%.

On a demographically-adjusted basis, On a poverty-adjusted basis, Great Oaks High School and Career Center sits in the bottom 10% statewide. Predicted proficiency from the FRL regression is roughly 89.9%; actual is 19.6%, a gap of -70.2 points.

Zooming out to the county, the surrounding county (Polk County) reports that median household earnings sit near $83,576, 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), Great Oaks High School and Career Center is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Harding Middle School, around 0.2 miles off. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Great Oaks High School and Career Center. Ranking that nearby cluster on reported proficiency puts Great Oaks High School and Career Center at 8th of 8; the average score across the group is 42.8%.

Geographically, the school is in a metropolitan area. Great Oaks High School and Career Center is a charter school, which puts it inside the public-school system but outside the standard district-managed model.

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