Central High

Central High is one of the expansive 9-12 campuss in La Crosse, Wisconsin, part of La Crosse School District, with 969 students on its rolls from grades 9 through 12. By comparison, Wisconsin's public schools average about 475 students each, so Central High sits 104% above that benchmark.

Within La Crosse School District, which oversees 19 schools and 5,717 students, Central High is one campus in the system.

On demographics, Central High lists that 68% of the student body identifies as White; the rest looks like 12% multiracial, 9% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 5% Black. By comparison, La Crosse County as a whole is about 88% White, so the school skews meaningfully less White than its surroundings.

On the resource side, Staff filings list 75 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 13.0:1 students per teacher. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 14.6:1 average. An estimated 39% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly cited indicator of low-income enrollment.

With demographic context factored in, Central High sits in the middle band of the BeatsExpectations distribution. Schools with this campus's student mix typically land near 53.6%; this one delivers 43.5%.

Across the wider county, community-level numbers for La Crosse County indicate the typical household earns roughly $73,013 per year, 37% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 5%. In all, La Crosse County runs 38 public schools (combined enrollment of about 14,903 students), of which Central High is one.

Spence Elementary is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.4 miles from this campus. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Central High comes 6th of 8 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 49.4%.

The campus sits in a downtown setting.

Looking at the recent track record. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Central High has fell 9%, going from 1,062 students in 2018 to 969 in 2025. The White share of enrollment contracted from 73% to 68% over that span. Class-load math has narrowed: from 14.8:1 in 2018 to 13.0:1 in 2025.

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