The Most Hispanic School Districts in America

Several large public school districts along the Texas border now enroll a student body that is more than 99 percent Hispanic. La Joya ISD, in the western part of the Rio Grande Valley, reports 99.8 percent. Laredo ISD, sitting directly across the river from Nuevo Laredo, reports 99.6 percent. These are not tiny outliers. La Joya enrolls close to 23,000 students, Laredo more than 20,000. In districts this size, a Hispanic share above 99 percent means a nearly universal one.

That finding sets the tone for the whole ranking. allk12 ran the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) SY 2024-25 enrollment file for every district enrolling 20,000 or more students and sorted by Hispanic share. The result is not a national scatter. It is two regions, repeated over and over.

The 16 Most Hispanic Large Districts

The table below lists districts of 20,000 or more students, ranked by the share of enrollment reported as Hispanic. Enrollment counts and percentages come straight from the NCES file for SY 2024-25.

Source: allk12 analysis of NCES SY 2024-25 enrollment. Districts enrolling 20,000 or more students, ranked by Hispanic share of enrollment.

Region One: The Texas-Mexico Border

Nine of the sixteen districts are in Texas, and every one of them hugs the border. Seven sit inside the Rio Grande Valley, the fan of counties at the state's southern tip: La Joya, Laredo just upriver, United ISD (also in Laredo, the suburban counterpart to the older city district), Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD, Edinburg CISD, and Brownsville ISD near the Gulf. The other two, Ysleta ISD and Socorro ISD, plus the larger El Paso ISD, cover the far western corner of the state where Texas meets both New Mexico and Chihuahua.

The pattern is geographic before it is anything else. These communities have been majority Mexican American for generations, in many cases predating the current border itself. Families cross for work, school, and relatives on both sides. When a district's attendance zone is drawn inside a city that is itself over 90 percent Hispanic, the school enrollment simply mirrors the neighborhood. There is no policy lever producing a 99.8 percent figure. It is who lives there.

Size matters here too. Socorro ISD enrolls nearly 47,000 students and is still 91 percent Hispanic. El Paso ISD, the largest Texas district on the list at roughly 48,000, comes in at 84.1 percent, lower than its Valley counterparts because the city of El Paso holds a somewhat more mixed population, including a military presence tied to Fort Bliss. That single district is a useful reminder that the share drops as soon as a district reaches into a more varied metro.

Region Two: Inland and Orange County California

The other seven districts are in California, and they split into two familiar clusters. Santa Ana Unified in Orange County leads the state group at 95.9 percent, the highest Hispanic share of any large California district in our count. Santa Ana has been a center of Mexican American settlement in Southern California for decades, and its schools reflect a city where Spanish is a first language for a large majority of households.

The rest sit inland, in the belt running from the San Gabriel Valley out to the Inland Empire and up into the southern San Joaquin Valley. Downey Unified and Pomona Unified anchor the Los Angeles County side. Rialto Unified, Fontana Unified, and San Bernardino City Unified form a tight run across the Inland Empire, where housing costs pushed working families east of Los Angeles over the past two decades. Bakersfield City, at the southern end of the Central Valley, rounds out the list at 83.2 percent in a region built around agriculture.

The California shares run a little lower than the Texas ones, in the low-to-mid 80s to mid 90s rather than the high 90s. That gap is not noise. These are suburban and second-city districts inside large, diverse metros, so even a heavily Hispanic district here still enrolls meaningful shares of White, Black, and Asian students. The border districts in Texas do not.

What the List Leaves Out

Puerto Rico's public school system is over 99 percent Hispanic, which would place it at or above the top of any share ranking. It is excluded here because it is a US territory, not a state, and mixing it in would swamp the state-level comparison this list is built for.

The 20,000-student floor changes what you see. Plenty of smaller Texas border districts and rural California districts post Hispanic shares as high or higher than La Joya's, but they enroll a few thousand students and sit below the cutoff. This is a big-district ranking. Read it as a map of where large Hispanic-majority school systems have formed, not as the single most Hispanic school district in the country, which would almost certainly be a small one.

What to Do With This

If you are a parent, a reporter, or a district administrator, the useful takeaway is the concentration, not the individual numbers. A near-universal Hispanic enrollment shapes everything from bilingual program design to the way state accountability formulas land, because comparison groups built on statewide demographics do not describe these communities well. When you see a district at 96 or 99 percent Hispanic, the relevant peer set is the region around it, not the state average. You can pull the same enrollment and demographic figures for any district on our Texas and California school pages and check where a given district falls against its actual neighbors.

Sources
allk12 analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) enrollment data, SY 2024-25.
National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data