808 5th Ave, Des Moines, IA 50309

I've had three children at Edmunds over the last 10 years. All three are highly accelerated in Math and score years ahead in Reading. My son won district wide awards in Science and for Vocabulary. My daughters had artworks featured in City art shows. The numbers you see in Reading and Math reflect the fact that many families in our neighborhood are recent immigrants. Their children are eager to learn and well behaved, but in some cases have not had educational opportunities or have been educated in a different language. We also have a concentration of poverty in this part of the city that is reflected in the numbers. The real question is whether the school has the programs, the determination, and the knowledge of how to educate children from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds, and whether the school has a community of children where kids learn. I have seen all of that Edmunds first hand for several years. The Reading and Math scores will not tell you that information about any school. At best, the scores largely reflect what the child has learned before arriving at the school, at worst, the scores tell us how much income the parents of the children have.