Forest Park Elementary

As a middle-of-the-pack elementary campus in Kannapolis, North Carolina, Forest Park Elementary enrolls 472 students from grades K through 5, operated by Kannapolis City Schools.

Kannapolis City Schools runs 9 schools in total, collectively educating 5,377 students. Forest Park Elementary is one of those campuses.

On the student-mix side, Forest Park Elementary logs that the most-represented group is Black (35%), with the rest of the student body spread across multiple groups. Beyond that, the school shows 31% Hispanic, 20% White, 11% multiracial, 3% Asian. That is visibly more Black than the county at large, where the share is closer to 19%.

Looking at the economic backdrop, On paper, Forest Park Elementary has 37 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 12.8:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 14.9:1 average. An estimated 99% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. By comparison, Cabarrus County runs at roughly 56%, so the school's eligibility rate is meaningfully above the surrounding baseline.

After controlling for student poverty, Forest Park Elementary tracks the demographic baseline. The model predicts 48.5% given the school's FRL share; actual proficiency is 44.5%.

Across the wider county, community-level numbers for Cabarrus County indicate the typical household earns roughly $89,005 per year, about 38% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and roughly 7% of residents live below the federal poverty line. Across Cabarrus County's 56 public schools (combined enrollment of about 43,278 students), Forest Park Elementary is one campus in the mix.

The closest other public school is Royal Oaks Elementary, roughly 1.1 miles away. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Forest Park Elementary. Ranking that nearby cluster on reported proficiency puts Forest Park Elementary at 4th of 8; the average score across the group is 44.5%.

The campus sits in an outer-ring setting.

Over the past 7-year window. Forest Park Elementary's enrollment has shrank 9% since 2018, when it stood at 517 (now 472). The White share of enrollment ticked down from 36% to 20% over that span. Class-load math has tightened: from 15.2:1 in 2018 to 12.8:1 in 2025.

On the community side, members of the Forest Park Elementary community share and discuss open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.