Original Research by School Decision on Field Kindley High
Field Kindley High sits in Coffeyville, Kansas, a small industrial city with a refinery, a nitrogen plant, a John Deere transmission works, and a Sherwin-Williams smelting facility that together anchor a local economy that has seen better decades. The city’s population has been declining for years, and the housing stock reflects that: a notable share of homes are vacant. The median household income in Coffeyville is low, and a substantial portion of residents live below the poverty line. Home values in the area around the high school are far below state and national medians, and while year-over-year price growth has been positive, the absolute numbers remain modest. For a family moving into the district, the housing market offers relatively low entry costs, but the broader economic context is one of contraction and limited new development.
The school itself serves grades nine through twelve and enrolls roughly 450 students. The student body is diverse: slightly less than half of students identify as white, with about three out of ten identifying as Hispanic, close to one in five as multiracial, and a smaller but meaningful share identifying as Black. A little over half of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a share that aligns with the community’s economic profile. The grade distribution across all four high school years is reasonably balanced, suggesting a stable enrollment pattern through the upper grades, though the senior class is the smallest.
State assessment data for Field Kindley High was not available in the records reviewed. That is not unusual for certain circumstances, and it means a parent looking for a straightforward measure of academic performance in core subjects will not find a published proficiency picture here. The same gap applies to the four-year graduation rate and the chronic absenteeism rate: those indicators were also missing from the data. A family considering this school will want to ask the school or district directly for current results on state tests and for the most recent graduation rate, as those are standard measures that most Kansas high schools report.
On the civil rights and student support side, information about discipline rates, course access, staffing ratios, and attendance patterns was not present in the available data. The number of students receiving special education services or classified as English learners was also not reported. Again, these are questions a parent would need to pursue directly with the school.
The school is part of the Coffeyville district, and the district-level search did not turn up any recent changes or strategic initiatives that would be of obvious interest to a parent, such as boundary shifts, new program launches, or facility plans. That absence does not mean nothing is happening, only that publicly available sources did not document it in a lasting way.
Coffeyville itself is a place with a deep industrial heritage and a traditional downtown that retains historic buildings from its late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century boom. Street life in the downtown is likely quiet given the population loss and high vacancy rates. The city has civic anchors including a community college with a main campus and a separate technical trades campus, a historic theater, and a municipal airport. The annual fair and rodeo and the Dalton Raid commemoration are ongoing community events. But the dominant narrative in the city’s recent history is the major flood that inundated about a third of the city, followed by a multi-year environmental remediation that led to many flood-damaged homes being purchased by the refinery owner. That recovery has shaped the east side of town and the local housing market.
Field Kindley High operates within this context as a comprehensive public high school for a small, economically stressed, slowly shrinking city. Without published test scores or graduation data, the school’s academic profile is opaque from available records. A parent should treat that as a prompt to gather current information from the school office and to ask about academic pathways, support for students who are struggling, and post-graduation outcomes including college-going and career placement. For families who value a small high school setting and who are comfortable with the local economic realities of Coffeyville, the school could be a workable option, but the lack of published performance data makes it difficult to compare against other options on paper.
See more original research from School Decision →