Drive through almost any town in America and you will eventually pass a Lincoln Elementary. That is not a coincidence, it is the single most common school name in the country. When you count every public school by its namesake, ignoring whether it ends in "Elementary," "High School," or just "School," a clear pattern emerges: dead presidents and plain geography win.
Across the roughly 100,000 public schools in the country, here are the most common namesakes.
| Namesake | Public schools |
|---|---|
| Lincoln | 240 |
| Central | 179 |
| Washington | 175 |
| Jefferson | 139 |
| Roosevelt | 93 |
| Franklin | 91 |
| Liberty | 85 |
| Madison | 79 |
| Highland | 70 |
| Mountain View | 68 |
| Fairview | 65 |
| Heritage | 64 |
| West | 64 |
| Riverside | 62 |
| North | 59 |
| East | 58 |
| Woodland | 56 |
| Wilson | 54 |
| Garfield | 52 |
| McKinley | 51 |
Count of public schools by core namesake, grouping "Lincoln Elementary," "Lincoln Elementary School," "Lincoln School," and similar together. Source: NCES SY 2024-25, compiled by allk12.
Presidents Run the Board
Nine of the top 20 names honor a president: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Franklin (as in Benjamin, though plenty of Franklin Roosevelt schools land here too), Madison, Wilson, Garfield, and McKinley. Lincoln alone lends his name to 240 public schools, more than 60 ahead of the runner-up. Washington and Jefferson round out the founding-and-Civil-War trio that most districts reached for when naming a neighborhood school in the 20th century.
What is striking is who is missing. The list skews heavily toward 19th-century figures. Kennedy, Eisenhower, and more recent presidents appear far down the ranking, and the naming wave that produced so many Lincoln and Washington schools had largely crested by mid-century.
The Other Big Category: No Name at All
The second most common "namesake" is not a person. It is direction and terrain. Central, Highland, Mountain View, Fairview, Riverside, Woodland, and the plain compass points, North, South, East, and West, together outnumber any single president. These are the safe, unobjectionable names a district picks when it does not want to honor anyone in particular: name the school for the neighborhood, the hill it sits on, or the river it overlooks.
Add in the aspirational names, Liberty and Heritage both crack the top dozen, and you have the three buckets nearly every school name falls into: a president, a place, or an ideal.
A Note on Counting
These figures group schools by their core name. "Lincoln Elementary," "Lincoln Elementary School," "Lincoln School," and "Abraham Lincoln Elementary" all count toward Lincoln, because they are the same idea with different suffixes. That is the honest way to answer "how common is this name," even if no single exact spelling reaches 240. For the record, the most common exact school name in the country is "Lincoln Elementary School," with 69, followed closely by the shorter "Lincoln Elementary," with 61.
If you want the full breakdown, our most common school names report lists the counts, and you can look up any specific school on the allk12 directory. The next time you pass a Lincoln, a Central, or a Roosevelt, you will know you are looking at one of a very large club.
