Summary:
ZIP code 66018 has two Kansas high schools serving grades 9–12: De Soto High School, with 918 students, and the Virtual Education Program, with 26. In 2025–26, De Soto’s all-grade proficiency was 52% in English language arts (ELA), 42% in math and 37% in science, compared with state rates of 46%, 41% and 38%, respectively. The clearest academic finding is that De Soto was above the state in ELA and math but slightly below it in science.
De Soto High School stands out on the available test results and on graduation and dropout measures; the Virtual Education Program has the lowest reported absenteeism but the higher dropout rate. De Soto’s 2023–24 graduation rate was 97%, versus 92% at the Virtual program, a 5-point difference. In 2024–25, De Soto’s dropout rate was under 1%, compared with 7% at the Virtual program, a 6-point gap. Conversely, 2025–26 chronic absenteeism was 0% at the Virtual program and 11% at De Soto; the state rate was 18%. The Virtual program has no test-score results in the supplied data, so the academic comparison cannot identify a two-school leader.
De Soto’s recent test-score pattern is mixed: from 2024–25 to 2025–26, ELA rose from 50% to 52%, while math fell from 46% to 42%. Its ELA advantage over the state stayed about 6 points, but its math lead narrowed by 6 points, from about 7 points to about 1. SchoolDigger’s ranking also moved down from 23rd of 318 schools (93rd percentile) in 2023–24 to 76th of 340 (78th percentile) in 2025–26, a 15-point percentile decline. As context, De Soto’s student–teacher ratio was 12.8 and its free/reduced-lunch rate was 22%; those figures were not reported for the Virtual program.
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