Original Research by School Decision on Westlake High School
Westlake High School serves a student body that is predominantly white, with a substantial minority of Black students and smaller numbers of Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial students. Its enrollment is spread fairly evenly across the four high school grades, and a large share of its students come from households with enough economic need to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is a regular public high school, not a charter or magnet, and sits within the Calcasieu Parish school system. The school is located in the small industrial city of Westlake, a community on the west bank of the Calcasieu River that is part of the Lake Charles metropolitan area. The local economy is anchored by chemical plants and oil refineries, with employers such as Sasol, PPG, and Georgia Gulf shaping the area’s character. The city supplies its own water and natural gas, and residential development is underway around the National Golf Club of Louisiana on the north end of town. The city’s motto, “A Growing Family Community,” points to a local ambition for steady residential growth.
The Calcasieu Parish district has made several recent moves that directly affect families at Westlake High. Voters in late 2024 renewed two property tax millages that generate funding for teacher salaries and school operations, without raising the tax rate. That renewal secures ongoing staffing and program support. The district has also implemented a districtwide literacy initiative featuring structured literacy approaches and reading interventions, an effort that earned a Magna Award from the Louisiana School Boards Association in early 2025. Additionally, the district passed a budget far larger than typical annual budgets for the 2022-23 school year, driven by FEMA reimbursement and rebuilding funds following Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020. That money funded major construction and renovation of at least ten school facilities across the parish, representing a long-term investment in infrastructure.
State testing data for Westlake High School was not available, so it is not possible to characterize the school’s academic proficiency from that source. A national academic context was also not available, and no program offerings were reported in the data. This means a parent looking for a clear picture of academic outcomes or advanced coursework options would need to go directly to the school or district for that information. Many high schools provide course catalogs, AP and dual-enrollment offerings, and career and technical education pathways; those details are not captured here. What is known is that the school reports no discipline data, no course access information, no staffing ratios, and no attendance figures in the available records. Civil rights data, including information on students with disabilities and English learners, was also absent from the data. These gaps do not indicate a problem at the school, but they do mean a parent interested in student support services, special education, or behavioral climate will need to ask the school directly for those specifics.
The housing market in the Westlake area shows that home values are somewhat below the state average, and rents are modest relative to the national median household income. This aligns with a small industrial city with a mixed residential character and active subdivision development. The school is a conventional neighborhood high school for a working- and middle-class community that has seen its population grow incrementally over time, driven by industrial employment. The comparison fact-set, which places Westlake High relative to the other districts in Calcasieu Parish, could not report on proficiency, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism because the data was missing for the school. That means there is no local benchmark to say how this school compares to its parish peers on those standard measures. The high school does not have a graduation rate in this data, and since it serves only grades nine through twelve, that metric would typically apply and its absence is simply a data gap rather than a structural one. A parent considering this school should treat it as a school whose academic performance on state assessments and graduation outcomes is undocumented in the available public data, and whose specific program offerings and student support structures are not described here. The school itself and the district office would be the sources to fill those gaps.
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