Summary
Southwood Elementary School is a PK–6 school at 1500 S 4th St on Columbus's near south side, serving 309 students as part of Columbus City Schools District, Ohio's largest district. Southwood ranks 1,400th of 1,560 Ohio elementary schools in 2025–26 — the 10th percentile, 1 star — and across nine ranked years it has never left the bottom fifth of the state, with a brief plateau near the 19th percentile in 2017–18 and 2018–19, a slide to a 5th-percentile floor in 2023–24, and a partial recovery since. The district itself ranks 683rd of 773 districts statewide.
On 2025–26 state tests, Southwood averaged roughly 24% proficiency across nine tested subjects, compared with about 37% for the district and about 62% for Ohio. That average hides a sharp split inside the building. Grade 6 is the brightest spot: 38.1% in math and 41.5% in English language arts, both above district levels, with the ELA result the highest sixth-grade score among nearby schools. Grade 5 is the opposite story: math was reported at 0%, ELA at 23.1%, and science at 19.2%. Grade 4 math, meanwhile, has climbed every year for four years, from 5.1% to 25.7%.
Attendance is Southwood's relative strength. Its chronic absenteeism rate of 55.1% in 2025–26 is a serious number on its own, but it is better than 8 of the 10 nearby schools and only slightly above the district's 53.8%, and it has improved about 14 points from its 2021–22 peak of 69.3%. The school ranks 4th of 10 nearby schools: clearly ahead of Moler, Sullivant and Livingston, but behind Stewart Alternative Elementary School (27th percentile) and Siebert Elementary School (22nd percentile), both within a mile. Stewart achieves those results with the largest classes in the cluster, and Southwood spends more per pupil than Siebert, which suggests spending alone is not the barrier here. Note that free/reduced-lunch data are unavailable for this school, and spending figures date to 2018–19.
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