The top reported proficiency rate is 6% in English language arts. The lowest is 5% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Hope Leadership Academy
Hope Leadership Academy is a public charter elementary school in Kansas City, Missouri, serving kindergarten through fifth grade. It operates as a single-school charter district, which means the school’s board and its sponsor are the sole governing and accountability bodies. While no Title I designation was provided, a very large share of the enrolled students qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, a marker of a high-need population.
The school is small overall, with enrollment distributed across each elementary grade. The student body is predominantly Black, with a much smaller share of Hispanic students and very small numbers of white and multiracial students; no Asian, American Indian, or Native Hawaiian students were reported. Data on the share of students with Individualized Education Programs or English Learner status was not available.
Academically, the state assessment results for the most recent testing year are limited and, where reported, low. In fourth-grade math and in third- and fourth-grade English language arts, the share of students scoring proficient or above was in the single digits. Results for third-grade math, fifth-grade math, fifth-grade English language arts, and fifth-grade science were suppressed, likely because the tested groups were too small for public reporting under state data rules. State testing data for grades before third grade was not available because those grades are not tested. The overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades places the school in the bottom quartile relative to other districts in Jackson County. A single-year trend is available for English language arts, showing a proficiency rate that is very low; no multi-year comparison is possible because only one year of data was present.
The school sits within Kansas City, a major urban center with a large geographic footprint. The city is car-dependent overall but has concentrated walkable pockets downtown, in the River Market, and along the Country Club Plaza and Crossroads districts. The area has seen steady downtown residential development and growth along the streetcar corridor. Housing values in the school’s zip code were below the state and national benchmarks in a recent period, while rents were above the previous year’s level, consistent with metro-wide rent growth. The local economy is diverse, anchored by government, hospital systems, logistics and transportation tied to the city’s rail and river history, and a regional financial and telecommunications sector.
Hope Leadership Academy’s governance structure changed in a recent year, when Saint Louis University began serving as its charter sponsor. That shift replaced the previous oversight body and is a lasting operational change for the school. No other district-level changes, such as facility plans or leadership turnover, were publicly found.
For a family considering this school, its small elementary setting, serving a high-poverty student population in an urban Kansas City neighborhood, is a defining characteristic. The academic proficiency results available are weak, and the number of tested students in any given subject and grade is small, so year-to-year swings can be large. A parent may want to ask the school directly about its instructional approach, intervention strategies for students below grade level, and how the school uses its charter autonomy to address these outcomes. There is no high school body, so no graduation rate applies.
See more original research from School Decision →