Bella Vista Elementary

Located at 1025 East 28th St., in Oakland, California, Bella Vista Elementary is an intimate K-5 school that teaches 349 students (grades K through 5), part of Oakland Unified. That puts it 25% smaller than the typical public school in California, which averages around 465 students.

Oakland Unified runs 84 schools in total, collectively educating 33,973 students. Bella Vista Elementary is one of those campuses.

Looking at the student body, Bella Vista Elementary logs that the most-represented group is Asian (34%), with the rest of the student body spread across multiple groups. The remainder comes out to 27% Hispanic, 22% Black, 10% multiracial, 5% White. Compared to Alameda County overall, the school's racial mix sits in roughly the same range.

Looking at school resources, The school lists 15 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 23.3:1. The state averages around 22.3:1, so this campus is higher than the state norm typical. About 86% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, often used as a Title I proxy. That share is noticeably above Alameda County's rate of about 49%.

On a demographically-adjusted basis, Bella Vista Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 28.1%, the actual is 37.1%, a residual of +9.0 points.

Zooming out to the county, census data for Alameda County shows the typical household earns roughly $129,367 per year, about 52% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 6%. In all, Alameda County runs 394 public schools (combined enrollment of about 210,511 students), of which Bella Vista Elementary is one.

Nearest neighbor: Oakland High, around 0.3 miles off. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Bella Vista Elementary. On composite proficiency, Bella Vista Elementary comes 4th of 9 in the immediate cluster, below the nearby-schools average of 37.4%.

The school occupies a city-core site.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count ticked down 22%: 447 students in 2018 compared to 349 in 2025. Over the same period, the Asian share ticked down from 50% to 34%.

In the discussion threads here, the feed for Bella Vista Elementary typically covers classroom updates, athletics, and weather closures. Members of the school community can share what they know.