Summary:
Independence, Iowa is home to a single public high school, Independence Junior Senior High School, which serves students in grades 9-12 within the Independence Community School District. While the school has seen a decline in its statewide ranking in recent years, dropping from 42nd out of 336 Iowa high schools in 2022-2023 to 183rd out of 340 in 2024-2025, a closer look at the school's performance and demographics provides a more nuanced understanding of its strengths and areas for improvement.
Academically, Independence Junior Senior High School has had mixed results on the Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress (ISASP) tests, with some grade levels performing above the state average in English Language Arts and Mathematics, while others fall below. The school's 4-year graduation rate for the 2023-2024 school year was 88.3%, slightly below the state average, and its chronic absenteeism rate for the same year was 21.6%, which is relatively high. Despite these challenges, the school's per-student spending for the 2018-2019 school year was $15,700, higher than the state average, and the student-teacher ratio of 16.3 is only slightly higher than the recommended ratio for high schools.
Overall, while Independence Junior Senior High School faces some performance-related obstacles, the data suggests opportunities for the school to address areas of concern, such as chronic absenteeism and uneven academic achievement, while leveraging its higher-than-average funding and relatively low student-teacher ratio to improve outcomes for its student population, which includes a significant portion of economically disadvantaged students.
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