Original Research by School Decision on Crawfordsville Sr High School
Crawfordsville Sr High School is a regular public high school serving grades nine through twelve in Crawfordsville, the county seat of Montgomery County. It is part of Crawfordsville Community Schools. The school enrolls a mid-sized student body for a high school in a small city, with a draw that covers the Crawfordsville area and likely the surrounding township. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a marker that families should weigh in context of the school's overall resource picture. The student body is predominantly White, with a notable Hispanic presence that reflects broader regional population patterns and a small share of Asian, Black, and multiracial students. Data on students with disabilities and English learners were not reported in the available records, so a parent wanting to understand special education or language support services would need to inquire directly with the school.
The community around the school shapes its character. Crawfordsville is a city with a mix of industrial manufacturing, higher education, and historic downtown anchors. Major employers include Nucor Steel, Lakeside Book Company, and Pace Dairy Foods, alongside Wabash College and Ivy Tech Community College. The presence of two colleges in a town of this size means some families have ties to academia, and the high school sits in a community that values its literary and cultural heritage, once called the Athens of Indiana. The town has a compact downtown with a courthouse square, a Carnegie library, museums, and a regional airport. Amtrak’s Cardinal stops in Crawfordsville, and the city provides public transportation. The population has seen modest growth in recent years, and median home values and rents have risen, though housing remains affordable relative to state and national benchmarks. A parent considering a move here would find a stable, midwestern small city with an industrial base and a college-town overlay.
Housing in the school’s attendance zone is accessible by national standards. Typical home values are well below the state median, and rents are similarly modest, though both have been rising gradually. For a family weighing the trade-offs, the area offers a lower cost of living than many parts of Indiana, and the local economy provides a range of blue-collar and professional jobs.
What the available data does not deliver is equally important. State assessment results are absent from the record, so there is no publicly reported measure of how students perform in math, reading, or other tested subjects. The four-year graduation rate is also missing. Because the school serves only high school grades, these are metrics that would normally be expected, and their absence is a significant gap for any parent trying to judge academic outcomes. The comparisons that typically place a school relative to other districts in Montgomery County could not be made for proficiency or graduation, leaving the school without an academic benchmark. A parent should treat this as an open question and seek out the school’s most recent state report card or test scores directly from the Crawfordsville Community Schools central office.
Program offerings, course access, discipline data, and staffing ratios were not included in the available information. The school’s website or district materials may detail Advanced Placement, dual-credit arrangements with Ivy Tech or Wabash College, career and technical education pathways, or extracurricular programs, but none of that appears in the data provided. Without that detail, a family interested in a specific academic track—engineering, the arts, early college—has little to rely on beyond the general profile of the community.
In summary, Crawfordsville Sr High School is a conventional public high school in a small industrial and college town, with a student body that is economically diverse by the free-lunch measure and racially and ethnically reflective of the area. The community offers a stable, affordable setting with historic charm and solid employment. But the missing academic performance data is a real limitation for any parent evaluating the school’s effectiveness, and filling that gap will require direct inquiry. This is a school where the context is clearer than the classroom results, and the next step for a parent is to ask for the numbers.
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