High Schools in Columbus

High schools in Columbus are represented by one school, Columbus Junior High and High School, which serves grades 7–12 and enrolls 438 students. Its student–teacher ratio is 11.1 to 1, and its all-grades test results are below Kansas’s in each tested subject; the biggest concern is science, where 22% of students were proficient, compared with 38% statewide.

Columbus Junior High and High School has no local school-to-school leader or trailer because it is the only school listed, but its results show clear differences by subject and grade. ELA is its strongest all-grades subject at 36% proficient, while science is lowest at 22%; math was 27%, compared with 41% statewide. The strongest grade-and-subject comparison is 10th-grade ELA: 41.2% versus 40.7% statewide, or about 0.4 points higher. At the other end, 8th-grade math was 20%, compared with 40% statewide—a 19-point gap. Graduation was 91%, 2 points above the state rate, and dropout was 0.5%, 0.7 points below the state; chronic absenteeism was higher, at 23% versus 18% statewide, a 5-point gap. The free/reduced-lunch rate was 55%.

All three all-grades subject scores rose from 2024–25 to 2025–26: ELA increased by 2 points, math by 1 point, and science by 2 points. The average gap with Kansas narrowed by 2 points, from 15 to 13 points, but math’s gap widened from 12 to 14 points; the science gap narrowed partly because the state score fell. SchoolDigger’s ranking history also shows a dip followed by a partial recovery: the school moved from 125th of 318 schools in 2023–24 to 231st of 332 in 2024–25, then to 207th of 340 in 2025–26. Its percentile ranking fell from 61st to 30th, then rose to 39th, so the ranking trend is less consistently positive than the recent test-score increases.