Apache Elem

Apache Elem is a heavily attended primary school in Overland Park, Kansas, overseen by Shawnee Mission Pub Sch. The school instructs 526 students in grades pre-K through 6. Enrollment runs roughly 68% larger than the state mean of about 313.

Across the 45 schools in Shawnee Mission Pub Sch (26,330 students total), Apache Elem accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

Looking at the student body, Apache Elem shows that 47% of students identify as Hispanic, with the remaining enrollment distributed across several groups. The remainder comes out to 27% White, 13% Black, 10% multiracial. By comparison, Johnson County as a whole is about 9% Hispanic, so the school skews meaningfully more Hispanic than its surroundings.

On the income-and-resources front, The school lists 35 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 14.8:1. That figure is higher than the state norm's 13.2:1 average. Roughly 77% of students at Apache Elem qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. That share is higher than Johnson County's rate of about 27%.

After controlling for student poverty, Apache Elem performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 25.4%, the actual is 28.4%, a residual of +3.0 points.

In the surrounding community, Johnson County reports that median household earnings sit near $109,208, 58% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 3%. Across Johnson County's 168 public schools (combined enrollment of about 93,598 students), Apache Elem is one campus in the mix.

The closest other public school is Westridge Middle, roughly 0.5 miles away. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Apache Elem. On composite proficiency, Apache Elem comes 7th of 9 in the immediate cluster, below the nearby-schools average of 37.3%.

Apache Elem operates from a downtown location.

Trend over the last 7 years. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Apache Elem has shrank 16%, going from 625 students in 2018 to 526 in 2025. Hispanic enrollment moved from 34% to 47% across the same window. The student-to-teacher ratio narrowed from 17.6:1 in 2018 to 14.8:1 today.

On this page, members of the Apache Elem community share and discuss science fair prep, picture-day reminders, and bus-route questions. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.