Paola Middle

Paola Middle, a medium-sized intermediate school in Paola, Kansas, one of the schools within Paola, enrolls 413 students, covering grades 6 through 8.

Paola runs 4 schools in total, collectively educating 1,732 students. Paola Middle is one of those campuses.

On the student-mix side, Paola Middle logs that nearly all students (88%) are White. The remainder consists of 6% Hispanic, 4% multiracial. That mix tracks the wider county fairly closely.

On the resource side, The school employs 32 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 13.1:1. The state averages about 12.7:1, putting this campus right in line with peers. An estimated 39% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator.

With demographic context factored in, Paola Middle performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 43.3%, the actual is 39.7%, a residual of -3.6 points.

Around the school, Miami County reports that the typical household earns roughly $89,000 per year, about 31% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 6%. Across Miami County's 17 public schools (combined enrollment of about 6,529 students), Paola Middle is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Paola High, around 0.3 miles off. 3 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Paola Middle comes 2nd of 6 in the immediate cluster, higher than the nearby-schools average of 32.7%.

Paola Middle operates from a town-center location.

Trend over the last 7 years. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Paola Middle has edged down 9%, going from 454 students in 2018 to 413 in 2025. Class-load math has tightened: from 14.5:1 in 2018 to 13.1:1 in 2025.

Within the allk12 community for this school, the feed for Paola Middle typically covers fundraisers, lost-and-found posts, and report-card season. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.