Southeast Polk Community School District

It never has a ZIP Code to itself

The counts below come from the census blocks assigned to Southeast Polk Community, grouped by the ZIP Code area each block falls in. The Census Bureau publishes the blocks; the grouping is computed here, and it is the only place these particular numbers exist.

• Homes inside the boundary15,953
• Residents40,440
• ZIP Code areas it reaches8
• Where it is the only district0
• Where it shares with another district6
• Where it holds under half a percent2
• Land area113 square miles
• Homes per square mile142

The ZIP Code areas it reaches

The spread is the thing to notice. In 50009 this district holds 98% of the homes; in 50047 it holds no homes at all. Same district, opposite answers, and a lookup that names it without the share tells the second household the same thing as the first.

• ZIP Code 50009 · Altoona, Iowa98% of the homes
• ZIP Code 50237 · Runnells, Iowa96% of the homes
• ZIP Code 50169 · Mitchellville, Iowa81% of the homes
• ZIP Code 50327 · Pleasant Hill, Iowa70% of the homes
• ZIP Code 50317 · Des Moines, Iowa13% of the homes
• ZIP Code 50228 · Prairie City, Iowa0.9% of the homes
• ZIP Code 50035 · Bondurant, Iowa3 homes, under half a percent
• ZIP Code 50047 · Carlisle, Iowano homes at all

What one name misses in the areas it leads

Southeast Polk Community is the largest district in 4 ZIP Code areas, and not one of them is wholly its own. Answer with its name alone and the answer misses 1,860 of the 15,707 homes those areas hold. That count is computed here from census blocks; the lookups that answer this question with a single name never print it.

ZIP Code 50327 · Pleasant Hill, Iowa is a two-district area: 3,347 of its 4,771 homes are inside Southeast Polk Community, and the other 1,424 homes are with Des Moines Independent Community. Which one an address belongs to is settled by the street, not by the five digits.

Southeast Polk Community is one of 4 districts the file names for ZIP Code 50169 · Mitchellville, Iowa at that level. It holds 886 of the 1,097 homes there; the rest is 211 homes with Colfax-Mingo Community, Bondurant-Farrar Community and PCM Community. One name for that area is not a simplification, it is a different answer for 211 of the homes in it.

In ZIP Code 50009 · Altoona, Iowa the split runs 8,452 to 179 and the larger part is Southeast Polk Community's: the rest is 179 homes with Bondurant-Farrar Community.

Southeast Polk Community reaches into ZIP Code 50317 · Des Moines, Iowa with 2,094 of its 15,571 homes; 3 districts there hold a real share of it, and Des Moines Independent Community leads them. The familiar answer for that area is one of the others, and it is wrong for those 2,094 homes.

Southeast Polk Community is not the name anyone would give for ZIP Code 50228 · Prairie City, Iowa — PCM Community leads it — and Southeast Polk Community holds 9 homes there all the same. Answer that area with one name and that is what it is wrong about.

Who takes the other homes in its ZIP Codes

Southeast Polk Community runs pre-K through grade 12 itself, so an address it holds sees no change of authority between grade school and high school. The districts listed below are the ones that take the other homes in the ZIP Code areas it shares — Des Moines Independent Community, Bondurant-Farrar Community and Carlisle Community. They are neighbors on the same postal ground, not the next stop for its own students.

• Des Moines Independent Community School District14,073 homes in 2 shared ZIP Code areas
• Bondurant-Farrar Community School District3,139 homes in 3 shared ZIP Code areas
• Carlisle Community School District2,331 homes in 1 shared ZIP Code area
• PCM Community School District1,049 homes in 3 shared ZIP Code areas
• Saydel Community School District813 homes in 1 shared ZIP Code area
• Colfax-Mingo Community School District119 homes in 2 shared ZIP Code areas

Who it shares ZIP Codes with

These districts appear alongside Southeast Polk Community in the same ZIP Code areas: PCM Community, Colfax-Mingo Community, Bondurant-Farrar Community and Des Moines Independent Community. A single-name lookup for one of those areas has to choose between them, and the choice is right for some addresses and wrong for others.

• PCM Community School District3 shared ZIP areas
• Colfax-Mingo Community School District2 shared ZIP areas
• Bondurant-Farrar Community School District2 shared ZIP areas
• Des Moines Independent Community School District2 shared ZIP areas
• Saydel Community School District1 shared ZIP area

Where this district sits

• School districts in Iowa678 of 969 ZIP areas split
• Every district with a page here260 districts listed

What to do next

Ask the district office to confirm your street address. A district settles that question on its own site: look for a school locator, a find my school tool, or an attendance zone map. Where there is none, ask the office itself.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: in 6 of the 8 ZIP Code areas Southeast Polk Community reaches, at least one other district holds a real share of the homes as well, and the line between them runs along streets. Only the district can say which side of that line an address is on.

This site links to no district website. None of the federal files it is built from publishes one, and a guessed address is worse than none. It is the district office, not a search engine, that settles an address.

If a house purchase depends on the answer, ask the district itself for written confirmation of that exact address. A listing is not a district record, and neither is this page.

What this cannot tell you

The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file. Nothing on this page adjusts one to the other. Where houses have been built or cleared since the count, a share here describes the place as it was counted rather than as it stands today, and in the fastest-growing ZIP Code areas that gap is the largest single source of error on this site.

A share on this page is a share of the homes in the ZIP Code area, not a probability for any particular address. Enrollment is decided by street address, and a district may run magnet, charter or choice programs that ignore the boundary entirely. If a decision depends on the answer, the district office is the only authority; this page shows what the federal boundary files say and when they were published.

A district boundary is not a school attendance zone. This site never says which school an address is assigned to: no current national dataset of attendance zones exists, and the district draws them itself. Nor is anything here endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau; we use their published files, and that is the whole of the relationship.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not an area. What is mapped here is the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the closest published approximation to it. The two are not identical, and a handful of ZIP Codes used only for post office boxes or single buildings have no tabulation area at all.

Where these numbers come from

School district boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Census Geographic Relationship File, current 2026 vintage, which assigns every census block to a unified district or to an elementary and a secondary district. Homes and residents in each block come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (PL 94-171), H1_001 and P1_001. The ZIP Code areas come from the same Geographic Relationship File, block to ZIP Code Tabulation Area. District names and grade ranges come from the Census Gazetteer 2025, with 2020 for districts no longer listed.

The place name printed beside a ZIP Code comes from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship files: place, county subdivision and county, taken 2026-09-06. It is a label rather than a measurement: the Census Bureau does not publish which post office a ZIP Code belongs to, so the place named is the one covering the most land inside the area, not the city the Postal Service prints on an envelope.

Everything else on this page — the shares, the counts of districts per ZIP, the comparison between the two grade bands, the rankings — is computed here from those files. The source publishes none of it. Snapshot taken 2026-09-03.