Are these numbers for high school (four years)? I wish you could see trends for each school.
EDIT: Just saw it's for FR, SO, JR only
EDIT: Just saw it's for FR, SO, JR only
BEDS Rankings for 23-24
- Thread starter wxman1
- Start date
Pretty sure Linn-Mar pulls tax $$$ from NE Cedar Rapids as well, Bowman Woods area, Collins Road, the Rockwell campus. I could be wrong but I think all of those property tax dollars go to Linn-Mar. That's why Marion ISD's growth has been so limited, its tax base has been essentially surrounded with no way to grow. Not the case with Linn-Mar. All that growth out by Hiawatha and Robins too goes to LM I think. I could be wrong.
Not so sure abt that- where will kids go? Dont think Xavier will get tons bigger either. They will just raise tuition.
Agree wash and jeff at risk, but mostly because those schools suck in the first place. Kennedy is doing just fine. And its not 100% student demographics. Wash used to be the top dog, but no longer.
Gf daughter is a junior at Jeff, and its sad there. You can find good classes and teachers if you look, but its on you. Lot of apathy in the faculty and admin, from what i can tell. They were talking abt shutting down the football program due to lack of players. No one cares.
That's true, I forgot about the north side of CR. I don't know about Hiawatha, but my nieces in Robins both went to LM.
Maybe decimate isn't the right word. Last straw might be accurate. Wash has been a great school academically, but athletically they are hurting due to enrollment. They (and Jeff) lose some kids to open enrollment, but as mentioned, the surrounding schools, Kennedy, Prairie or LM are full. Now any kid above average athletically will go to Xavier. Xavier will recruit them, treating Wash and Jeff like how mid-majors get treated in college.
West of council is CRCSD (Kennedy for HS) so all of Hiawatha and Robins west of that road which is where the growth is that direction.
Also in terms of commercial tax it is fairly limited and zero industrial.
Jeff is definitely going to suffer over the next few years with the way school funding is going right now. The district has a reputation, deserved or not, and with the ease of open enrolment the parents with some means are going to move their kids elsewhere.
I talked to a woman my age (late 40s/ early 50s) about the private school she went to. She mentioned that most of the students now come from towns up to 25 miles away and not many are from the town that it is in. I'm guessing she is exaggerating a little, but when you hear the names during events, you catch a lot of names that you know their parents are from a neighboring town. I think a lot of it comes down to how far away the private school is. If nothing close is available, then you probably won't see the movement to them as much.
i know that des moines christian had kids on their basketball team from Ames, Waukee, and out by Runnels when i was in school.
Yep, esp with how CR is expanding to the west and southwest (fairfax, atkins, et al). Its real easy to move from say, Cedar Hills out to Atkins or Fairfax and go to BC or Prairie.
What might help Jeff, maybe, is all the recent African immigrant kids. There are a ton of them there now, and my general impression is they are really happy to be here and attending school, and probably their parents are too. So there is a challenge with language and culture and assimilation, but they may change the "vibe" of the school from "dumping ground for kids no one cares about" to something more positive. I think there is an opportunity for that, anyway, with the right leadership both from parents and administration.
It is a good point but outside of elementary in Atkins everything else for BC is in Van Horne so a significant out of the way haul to do twice a day, unless of course you live in the district.
I graduated with 22 (4 were foreign exchange). The two classes behind me were 12 and 5.
Needless to say my high school no longer exists.
Needless to say my high school no longer exists.
I graduated from wash in the late 00s and I'd say a lot of the old money kids left the state after high school and aren't going back and having their kids go to school in iowa. These are 3rd or 4th generation wash families who live in all the old mansions and big houses around there. For a long time Wash had those families sort of funding things like a new weight room and generally made things work from a money perspective. I also think a lot of those families have moved to stuff on the outskirts of town or in surrounding towns.
The current battle with the country club isn't helping the situation on the backside of the school.
I live among some of the old money people near Wash and that's absolutely correct. They are mostly older doctors or insurance guys whose kids have long since graduated.
There is still a very wide deviation in economic status at the school, when you see kids getting off the bus as kids in Porsche Cayennes park in the lot. So there is still some money around, but few of them seem to be interested in funding the school. I do see more Xavier stickers on the back of Range Rovers though.
Will be interesting to see if the vouchers change this. Xavier is not known for recruiting in the way that Dowling has been said to do the same in the DSM metro. But the allure of vouchers, plus perhaps a very small scholarship, could make attending Xavier free for top CR-area athletes if the school/coaches start pursuing that.
There is also the religious angle - not every family will prefer their child to go to a Catholic school where the students attend Mass during the school day every month, and they take religious courses every day - as well as the fact that Xavier is not necessarily a better school to attend than the top public schools in CR like Kennedy or Linn-Mar. Just compare the AP coursework offered at each; it's not very close. But the athletic part of it will probably be tempting at least for some sports because Xavier is very good at plenty of them.
Dowling, Xavier, etc. might also discriminate on the basis of religion if the vouchers drive a lot more families to try to attend their schools; they may give preference to Catholics if they get to the point where they have more interested students than capacity. That might also affect athletic recruiting.
That's exactly what will happen. And Xavier does recruit, they just don't have a metro the size of DSM to poach. Xavier puts a large emphasis on winning athletically at every level, not just varsity.
Wasn't that the Isaac Newton Academy? Or was that sort of generic Christian? I remember it as a thing but don't know much about it.
It's tough to do private schools where the public schools are decent to good. And though Jeff & Wash have their issues, they are ...okay. And Marion, LinnMar, Kennedy et al are pretty good.
