Public school / Middle
Southwest Middle School - 38
Rapid City, South Dakota
- NCES ID
- 465982000457
- School type
- Regular
- Title I
- Not designated
Southwest Middle School - 38 is a public middle school in Rapid City, South Dakota, run by Rapid City Area School District 51-4. It enrols 660 students — the 21893rd largest of 763 public schools in South Dakota.
Reported figures, 2022–2023
The Common Core of Data is a directory collection: it records size and staffing, not achievement. Nothing here says whether a school is good.
Enrollment
660
Teachers
34.0
Students per teacher
19.4
Free or reduced-price lunch
13.2%
How these figures are defined
Enrollment
Students reported in the autumn headcount. Size is not quality — it is here because it is the figure every other one has to be read against, and because a school of 90 and a school of 4,000 are not comparable on anything else.
Teachers
Classroom teachers in full-time equivalents, so a half-time teacher counts as 0.5. Non-teaching staff are excluded.
Students per teacher
Enrollment divided by teacher FTE. It is not class size: it counts every teacher against every student, including specialists who never take a full class. A school can have 15 students per teacher and 30 in the room.
Free or reduced-price lunch
Share of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals — the most widely used proxy for concentrated poverty in a school. Districts under community eligibility report all students as eligible, which inflates the figure and makes cross-district comparison unreliable.
Within Rapid City Area School District 51-4
Schools in the same district, which is the comparison the data actually supports — a peer group defined by who runs them rather than by whichever names sort nearby.
- 1Central High School - 411,768 students
- 2Stevens High School - 421,686 students
- 3Southwest Middle School - 38660 students
- 4West Middle School - 37612 students
- 5East Middle School - 30600 students
- 6Valley View Elementary - 13581 students
- 7South Middle School - 36553 students
- 8Rapid Valley Elementary - 12514 students
- Enrollment+359.9%
- Teachers+277.8%
- Students per teacher+45.9%
- Free or reduced-price lunch−50.6%
Where this sits
Geographic context
District
Sources & licence
Collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. Nothing here is edited, interpolated or estimated.
Provenance
- National Center for Education Statistics
- Common Core of Data — school and district directory