National city placement
Middle-of-corpus city profile
According to NCES CCD 2024-25, Festus has more public-school enrollment than 49% of the 4,487 US cities in this directory. Festus 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.
A full K–12 ladder sits inside the city boundary
Festus's list includes 4 elementary, 2 middle, and 2 high-school campuses, plus 1 combined-grade record. The city average spans every major grade stage, so the ranked table is more informative when read within level than as one interchangeable queue.
A small portfolio contains radically different campus scales
Festus lists only 9 schools, yet reported enrollment runs from 57 to 1,045 students, a 18-fold range. In a portfolio this compact, the smallest record may be a specialized or nonstandard setting rather than a miniature version of the largest campus. That distinction affects how ratios and program fields should be read. Compare similarly configured grade levels first; combining the extremes into one city average conceals more than it explains.
