Iowa school safety

The most useful thing on this page may be the schools that show no score at all. Iowa had 1,333 schools in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection. We publish a safety score for 686 of them. The rest are blank, and that blank is the method working, not a hole in it. We put a number on a school only when its incident records are complete enough to believe.

Here is how the grades are built. Each school is compared to roughly 1,500 schools nationally that are closest to it in enrollment and teach the same grade levels. Among those peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of the incident rate — a deliberately low bar. A school reporting less than a quarter of what that bar implies for its size has not given evidence of safety. A and B are records we believe, and those schools get a score. C means a school reported almost nothing but is small enough that a true zero is common: not evidence of safety, but not implausible. D and E mean schools of that size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this one reported almost none.

In Iowa, 149 schools fall into that doubtful range. That is 11.2% of the state. Nationally the same share is 11.3%. Iowa's paperwork looks like the country's paperwork. Read that carefully: it is a statement about records, not about children. A doubtful grade means we cannot verify what a school submitted. It does not mean something happened there. The comparison is also not adjusted by state, because gaps between states in this data are gaps in reporting habits, not in child safety.

Why most Iowa districts have no rank

There are 327 school districts in Iowa. Twenty-five have enough scoreable schools to rank at all. A district ranking only means something when several of its schools have records we can verify, and most districts here do not clear that.

Among the ranked ones, North Scott Comm School District comes out safer than 92% of ranked US districts, with 5 of the 7 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. Cedar Falls Comm School District is safer than 91%, with 8 of 11. Davenport Comm School District is safer than 88%, with 5 of 30. Iowa City Comm School District is safer than 82%, with 15 of 29. Linn-Mar Comm School District is safer than 70%, with 8 of 12. Those ratios are worth reading alongside the rank: a district's standing rests only on the schools whose records held up.

Safest ranked cities in Iowa

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Iowa city with schools

Every Iowa school district