Summary:
The Karnes City Independent School District (Isd) is home to a single high school, Karnes City High School, which serves 281 students in grades 9 through 12 in a small, rural Texas community where about half of the students are economically disadvantaged.
Karnes City High School presents a mixed academic profile with notable strengths and weaknesses. The school's standout performance is in Biology, where 84.62% of students are proficient—a remarkable 14 percentage points above the state average. However, this success contrasts sharply with Algebra I, where only 39.68% of students are proficient, falling 14 percentage points below the state average. The school also performs slightly above average in English II Reading (66.07% vs. 59.88% statewide) but struggles in U.S. History (60.94% vs. 70.17% statewide). With a very low student-teacher ratio of 9.5:1, the school has the potential for individualized attention, yet this advantage does not translate into uniformly high scores, suggesting instructional quality varies significantly by subject.
Despite these challenges, the school is on a clear upward trajectory, improving its state ranking from the 41st percentile (2 stars) in 2023-2024 to the 52nd percentile (3 stars) in 2025-2026. The graduation rate of 70.2% is notably low but is dramatically higher than the district's overall rate of 41.4%, indicating that the high school is a relative bright spot in a district-wide retention crisis. The school's performance also shows significant year-over-year volatility—for example, Biology proficiency jumped 27 points in one year—likely due to its small cohort size, where the performance of a single class can heavily influence results.
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