The top reported proficiency rate is 38% in Math. The lowest is 36% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Gladden Elem.
Gladden Elementary serves kindergarten through fourth grade in Belton, a suburban city within the Kansas City metropolitan area. The school is part of the Belton 124 district and draws its enrollment from a community where residential subdivisions and commercial corridors sit near the I-49/U.S. 71 highway. The area has seen steady population growth, and housing costs, while rising, remain relatively moderate compared to closer-in Kansas City suburbs. That combination makes Belton an option for families seeking a more attainable entry point into the metro’s housing market while staying within commuting distance of the region’s job centers.
The student body at Gladden is predominantly white, with a substantial Hispanic presence and smaller shares of Black students and students of two or more races. More than seven in ten students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a rate that points to a high concentration of economic need. The school’s enrollment of roughly that size for a K-4 building is large enough to offer grade-level sections but small enough that children are not lost in a crowd. Because Gladden ends at fourth grade, there is no graduation rate to report, and state testing data is available only for the grades it serves.
On the Missouri Assessment Program, Gladden’s proficiency results sit near the middle among Cass County elementary schools when measured across tested subjects and grades, landing above the midpoint of the county’s districts. That is a fair but not exceptional position. In third grade, just over two in five students scored proficient or above in English language arts, and a slightly smaller share did so in math. By fourth grade, the numbers dropped: about three in ten reached the proficient bar in ELA, and roughly three and a half in ten did in math. A parent may want to ask the school how it supports students who are below that mark, especially given the drop-off between third and fourth grade in reading. The fourth-grade participation rate was reported at above nine in ten, so the results reflect nearly all of that grade’s students.
The Belton 124 district recently passed a no-tax-rate-increase bond issue that funds facility improvements, safety upgrades, HVAC replacements, and classroom additions across the district. That vote signals voter support for maintaining school buildings without raising the property tax rate. For a family at Gladden, this could translate into physical improvements to the school building in the near term.
What is not available from the data may matter to some families. Information on special education identification rates, English learner services, chronic absenteeism, discipline patterns, and staffing ratios was not reported in the sources used here. Those are gaps a parent would want to fill by visiting the school or talking with the principal. The school is a regular public school and is neither a charter nor a magnet, which means its enrollment is determined by attendance boundaries rather than application.
Gladden sits in Belton’s residential fabric, where schools are spread across separate campuses rather than clustered in a downtown core. The city itself offers a library branch, parks, and recreational facilities, but daily life is car-dependent. For a family considering this school, the picture is of a working-to-middle-income elementary school in a growing outer-ring suburb, where test performance is around the middle of the local county range and where the district has recently committed to infrastructure investment. The school does not serve upper grades, so a family with a young child would eventually face a transition to a different building for fifth grade, and later to middle school and high school within the district.
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