Kansas school safety

Kansas runs a lot of small districts. Most of them are a handful of buildings, and that single fact shapes almost everything on this page — which schools get a score, which districts get ranked, and how much either one can tell you.

The numbers come from the federal Civil Rights Data Collection for 2021-22. It covers 1,360 schools in the state. We publish a safety score for 721 of them.

Here is why the rest have none. We compare each school to roughly 1,500 American schools closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grade levels. Among the peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of their incident rate — a deliberately low bar. A school reporting less than a quarter of what that bar implies for its size has not given us evidence of safety. It has given us a blank. Schools we grade C are in that position but small enough that a true zero is ordinary, so we say nothing rather than guess. That C group, not doubtful reporting, is what accounts for most of the missing scores in Kansas.

Doubtful reporting — our D and E grades, where schools of the same size normally report several incidents or more and this one reported almost none — covers 125 Kansas schools, or 9.2% of the state. Nationally the figure is 11.3%. Read that carefully. It means Kansas paperwork is slightly more complete than the country's, and nothing else. It is not a finding about children in Kansas, and a school in the doubtful group is not a school we are calling dangerous. It is a school whose records we cannot check.

Why only 28 districts are ranked

The state has 290 districts. Only 28 have enough scoreable schools to rank at all. The others are not hiding anything; they simply do not have enough buildings with usable records to average.

Among the ranked ones, De Soto comes out safer than 97% of ranked US districts, with 9 of the 12 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. Hays is safer than 90%, with 5 of 7. Hutchinson Public Schools, 76%, with 7 of 11. Olathe, 64%, with 41 of 52. Goddard, 61%, with 9 of 12.

One caution about all of it: none of these comparisons are adjusted for state. Differences between states in this data are differences in reporting behavior, not in child safety.

Safest ranked cities in Kansas

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 Kansas city with schools

Every Kansas school district