Kato Public Charter School

Kato Public Charter School is one of the rural-scale senior highs in MANKATO, Minnesota, run under Kato Public Charter School, with 77 students on its rolls from grades 6 through 12. That puts it 79% smaller than the typical public school in Minnesota, which averages around 371 students.

Kato Public Charter School is the operating authority for Kato Public Charter School, handling staffing, calendars, and reporting to the state department of education.

In terms of who attends, Kato Public Charter School lists that 74% of the student body identifies as White. The remainder comes out to 9% multiracial, 8% Black, 6% Hispanic, 3% Native American. By comparison, Blue Earth County as a whole is about 85% White, so the school skews noticeably less White than its surroundings.

On the income-and-resources front, Staff filings list 8 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 9.7:1 students per teacher. The state averages around 16.3:1, so this campus is tighter than the state norm typical. An estimated 77% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. By comparison, Blue Earth County runs at roughly 37%, so the school's eligibility rate is somewhat above the surrounding baseline.

With demographic context factored in, Kato Public Charter School performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 23.9%, the actual is 13.8%, a residual of -10.1 points.

Zooming out to the county, ACS estimates for Blue Earth County put median household earnings sit near $74,477, 34% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and roughly 7% of residents live below the federal poverty line. Across Blue Earth County's 31 public schools (combined enrollment of about 9,034 students), Kato Public Charter School is one campus in the mix.

The closest other public school is Prairie Care Mankato, roughly 0.3 miles away. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Kato Public Charter School comes 5th of 5 in the immediate cluster, below the nearby-schools average of 58.8%.

The campus sits in an urban setting. Kato Public Charter School is a charter school, which puts it inside the public-school system but outside the standard district-managed model.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Kato Public Charter School has ticked up 8%, going from 71 students in 2018 to 77 in 2025. The White share of enrollment declined from 82% to 74% over that span. Class-load math has widened: from 8.2:1 in 2018 to 9.7:1 in 2025.

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