JIA Elementary

JIA Elementary is a small K-5 school in Jenison, MI, serving just 83 students as part of the highly-rated Jenison Public Schools district.

If you're looking for a school where your child will be well-known by name, JIA's tiny size is its defining feature. With only 83 students, it's dramatically smaller than every other elementary school in the area, which range from about 190 to over 850 students. This likely means a close-knit, personalized environment where teachers and staff can really get to know each family. However, that small size comes with trade-offs. The student-teacher ratio is actually the highest in the area at 17.4, meaning class sizes may not be as small as you'd expect. The school also spends less per student ($11,729) than its district peers, who spend between $14,740 and $18,983. Academically, JIA holds a solid 4-star rating and generally performs above state averages. A clear strength is 5th-grade math, where 60% of students were proficient in the most recent year—beating the district average and most other Jenison elementaries. That said, scores can swing significantly from year to year because a single class of students has an outsized impact on the data. For example, 4th-grade math proficiency dropped from 66.67% to 35.71% in just one year, so it's wise to look at multi-year trends rather than any single snapshot.

Compared to its own district, JIA is something of an outlier. It's the only Jenison elementary that ends at 5th grade, and it ranks lowest among the district's five elementaries—though all of them are strong. When you look across the nearby Grandville Public Schools, JIA generally outperforms those schools in core subjects. For instance, its 3rd-grade ELA proficiency (60%) is well above every Grandville elementary, which range from about 41% to 46%. The school has also seen a notable demographic shift, with the percentage of students receiving free or reduced lunch dropping from 42.86% to 20.48% over two years. For parents, JIA offers the intimacy of a small school within a top-tier district, but it's important to understand that its academic profile can be more variable than at larger schools.