The top reported proficiency rate is 70% in Math. The lowest is 63% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Rising Hill Elementary
Rising Hill Elementary sits in the far northern reaches of Kansas City, inside Clay County and part of the North Kansas City 74 school district. The school serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grade and is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet. It draws from a portion of Kansas City that lies north of the Missouri River, an area characterized by newer suburban-style residential growth on the city’s edge, where single-family homes sit on a landscape of open land that has been filling in over recent decades.
The student body is predominantly white, with a meaningful share of Hispanic students, a smaller but still present Black population, and a comparable group of students who identify as two or more races. Asian, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students together account for a small share of enrollment. More than a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a rate that places this school in a moderate economic context. Data on students with disabilities and English learners were not available in the reporting, so a parent may want to ask the school directly about those supports and how they are integrated into the general education setting.
On the Missouri Assessment Program, Rising Hill’s results stand out when placed beside other elementary schools in Clay County. The school’s overall proficiency rate across tested subjects and grades lands in the top quarter of schools in the county, with a composite index that exceeds the median of its county peers by a clear margin. In third-grade math and English language arts, roughly three-quarters of students scored at or above the proficient level. Fourth-grade proficiency rates dipped somewhat, with math still above a strong threshold and English language arts pulling back. By fifth grade, math proficiency remained solid, English language arts dropped further, and science proficiency matched the fifth-grade English rate. What this pattern suggests is that Rising Hill’s strongest academic performance comes early in the elementary span, with some softening as students move through the upper grades. A parent whose child struggles with reading or math in the later elementary years may want to ask how the school’s curriculum and interventions adjust to maintain momentum.
The school’s enrollment is moderate in size for an elementary building serving these grades, with numbers tapering slightly in the early grades and building toward a larger fifth-grade cohort. That distribution by grade can matter for class size and for how programs like music, art, and physical education are staffed, but the reporting did not include staffing ratios or course access details. The discipline data and chronic absenteeism rate were also not available, leaving those areas as open questions for a parent to raise with the school or district.
Kansas City itself is a large, spread-out city with a walkable downtown core that has seen significant residential reinvestment, particularly along the Main Street Streetcar corridor, but most of the city, including the area around Rising Hill, functions as a car-dependent suburban landscape. The North Kansas City 74 district covers a broad territory north of the river, and the housing market in the Rising Hill attendance zone reflects a home-value level that is higher than the Missouri state average and well above the national typical home value. Rents in the same area are also elevated, and rising year over year. For a family considering a move into this attendance area, the cost of entry is a factor to weigh, though the affordability of a home purchase relative to local income appears somewhat more manageable than the national average, aided by mortgage rates that have been near recent highs.
No recent district-level changes of note surfaced in the research, and the district brief found little in the way of bond measures, boundary adjustments, or curriculum shifts that would materially affect a family’s decision. The picture of Rising Hill is essentially a stable, high-performing suburban-adjacent elementary school in a growing part of the city, where academics in the early grades are notably strong and the upper grades, while still above average for the county, show some drop-off that a parent may want to understand more fully. The peer environment skews majority white with moderate economic diversity, typical of the area north of the river. The school does not offer programs beyond its regular elementary curriculum, and because it ends at fifth grade, there is no graduation rate to evaluate. The middle and high school pathway that feeds from Rising Hill would be the next question for a family to explore.
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