Bell Gardens Intermediate

Bell Gardens Intermediate is a middle-of-the-pack junior high in Bell Gardens, California, operated by Montebello Unified. The school serves 790 students in grades 6 through 8.

Across the 29 schools in Montebello Unified (19,149 students total), Bell Gardens Intermediate accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

On the student-mix side, Bell Gardens Intermediate reports that 99% of students identify as Hispanic, making the school strongly Hispanic-majority. The wider county runs roughly 48% Hispanic, putting the school's mix meaningfully more Hispanic than the area baseline.

In terms of school funding signals, On paper, Bell Gardens Intermediate has 42 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 18.9:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 20.7:1 average. Around 93% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. That share is noticeably above Los Angeles County's rate of about 70%.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Bell Gardens Intermediate performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 23.8%, the actual is 27.5%, a residual of +3.7 points.

Zooming out to the county, community-level numbers for Los Angeles County indicate the typical household earns roughly $90,112 per year, roughly 36% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 10%. Across Los Angeles County's 2244 public schools (combined enrollment of about 1,265,907 students), Bell Gardens Intermediate is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Garfield Elementary, around 0.5 miles off. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Bell Gardens Intermediate comes 3rd of 9 in the immediate cluster, above the nearby-schools average of 24.8%.

Geographically, the school is in a bedroom-community area.

Looking at the recent track record. Over the past 7-year window, the student count declined 32%: 1,157 students in 2018 compared to 790 in 2025. The student-to-teacher ratio fell from 30.5:1 in 2018 to 18.9:1 today.

On this page, posts here usually surface around classroom updates, athletics, and weather closures. Members of the school community can share what they know.