Compiled from official source data by PlainSchools.
18 public K-12 schools in Garden City from NCES Common Core of Data: enrollment, grade span, demographics, and Civil Rights Data Collection statistics for every active campus.
According to NCES CCD 2024-25, Garden City has more public-school enrollment than 69% of the 4,487 US cities in this directory. Garden City sits in the broad middle of the national city distribution rather than at a single obvious extreme. Its scale, average Resource Investment Index, and staffing position need to be read together: a middle placement on one measure does not cancel a stronger or weaker result on another. The percentile panel makes those dimensions explicit, and the school table shows where the city aggregate breaks into materially different campus profiles.
The school portfolio is elementary-weighted
13 of Garden City's 18 listed schools are elementary campuses. That composition means citywide enrollment and staffing averages are influenced more by early-grade operating patterns than by the city's 1 middle and 1 high-school records. Families comparing later grades should rely on those individual rows rather than the all-school mean.
The composite and staffing measures point in different directions
Garden City's average Resource Investment Index sits at the 62nd percentile, while its teacher-staffing measure sits at the 22nd percentile. The 40-point percentile gap is a reminder that the index is not a class-size score: counselors, gifted-program reporting, and attendance also affect it. Compare those components directly when two schools have similar index totals; the same headline score can arise from a different mix of reported resources.
City enrollment
Top 31%
School count
Top 17%
Resource Index average
62nd percentile
Teacher staffing
22nd percentile
Garden City High School accounts for 27.7% of all Garden City public-school enrollment
That dominant concentration means Garden City-wide averages can mask substantial variation outside the largest entity. Grade level: High. The share measures enrollment concentration only; it does not establish how districts allocate programs, capital, or staff. Enrollment-weighted aggregates give this entity more weight than any smaller peer, while an unweighted entity average treats every record equally.
Garden City school enrollment varies 26× across entities
Garden City school enrollment ranges from 76 students (lowest) to 1,946 students (highest), a spread of 1,870 students. That spread is wider than typical and predicts noticeable gaps in service quality between the highest and lowest areas. Per-school staffing and program breadth can differ sharply at opposite ends of that enrollment range, so the city average should not be treated as a typical campus.
The reported share clears the 50% majority mark. Title I operates under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015), but its statutory allocation uses additional LEA-level counts and rules not represented by this average. This percentage is an economic-need context measure; it does not establish a Title I award, show dollars received, or describe how funds are distributed among campuses.
Garden City operates one school district — a single-district system
Garden City's listed schools share one district boundary, budget authority, and reporting chain. That makes citywide and districtwide governance easier to compare, but it does not make individual campuses uniform: grade configuration, staffing, programs, and student need can still vary materially within the same school district.
Garden City student-teacher ratio is 18.6:1 — high (typically associated with larger urban scale or staffing constraints that have widened the headcount gap)
student-teacher ratio is the simplest comparative metric but it does not capture the full picture: the ratio counts FTE classroom teachers against total enrollment, push-in specialists, English-language aides, special-education co-teachers, and counselors are not included in most reporting Higher values may reflect larger urban scale or recent resource constraints that have widened the gap.
Most racially and ethnically mixed schools in Garden City
Ranked by the Simpson student-body diversity index (0-100) from NCES race and ethnicity data, where higher means a more evenly mixed student body. It measures mix, not quality.
What do families ask about schools in Garden City?
Which Garden City school has the highest Resource Investment Index? ▼
Edith Scheuerman Elem has the highest Resource Investment Index among the Garden City schools in this federal-data comparison at 56/100. The index summarizes reported staffing, counseling, gifted-program, and attendance inputs; it is not an academic rating.
How many schools are in Garden City, KS? ▼
Garden City has 18 public schools with a total enrollment of 7,032 students. Average student-teacher ratio: 18.6:1.
Data from NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) 2024-25 and Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) 2021-22. The Resource Investment Index uses reported student-teacher ratio,
counselor access, gifted programs, and attendance; it is not an academic rating. Cities must include at least five schools to be listed. This public-data comparison is for informational purposes:
verify current enrollment, attendance boundaries, and programs with the school district before acting. See the guide to understanding NCES data.
