Westside Elementary

Westside Elementary, a reasonably sized primary school in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, run under Sun Prairie Area School District, enrolls 434 students, covering grades pre-K through 5. That puts it 34% bigger than the typical public school in Wisconsin, which averages around 323 students.

Across the 16 schools in Sun Prairie Area School District (8,549 students total), Westside Elementary accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

On the student-mix side, Westside Elementary reports that the most-represented group is Black (30%), with the rest of the student body spread across multiple groups. The remainder consists of 29% White, 21% Hispanic, 14% multiracial, 6% Asian. That is visibly more Black than the county at large, where the share is closer to 5%.

On the income-and-resources front, Westside Elementary logs 48 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 9.1:1. Statewide, the average ratio sits near 14.7:1, putting Westside Elementary tighter than the state norm the norm. Roughly 66% of students at Westside Elementary qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, often used as a Title I proxy. That share is above Dane County's rate of about 32%.

After controlling for student poverty, Westside Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 37.1%, the actual is 27.3%, a residual of -9.8 points.

In the area at large, ACS estimates for Dane County put the typical household earns roughly $89,975 per year, roughly 55% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 5%. In all, Dane County runs 169 public schools (combined enrollment of about 78,525 students), of which Westside Elementary is one.

The closest other public school is Sun Prairie Four Kids, roughly 0.6 miles away. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Westside Elementary. On composite proficiency, Westside Elementary comes 7th of 7 in the immediate cluster, behind the nearby-schools average of 46.8%.

The school occupies a commuter-belt site.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count shrank 6%: 460 students in 2018 compared to 434 in 2025. White enrollment moved from 45% to 29% across the same window. The student-to-teacher ratio narrowed from 11.3:1 in 2018 to 9.1:1 today.

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