Donner Trail Elementary

Donner Trail Elementary is a primary school of one-room-style scale in Kingvale, California, run under Tahoe-Truckee Unified, instructing 55 students in grades K through 5. By comparison, California's public schools average about 465 students each, so Donner Trail Elementary sits 88% below that benchmark.

Across the 11 schools in Tahoe-Truckee Unified (3,959 students total), Donner Trail Elementary accounts for its share of the district's footprint.

On the student-mix side, Donner Trail Elementary records that 95% of students identify as White, making the school strongly White-majority; the rest looks like 4% Hispanic. The wider county runs roughly 84% White, putting the school's mix noticeably more White than the area baseline.

On the resource side, On paper, Donner Trail Elementary has 4 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 13.8:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 22.3:1 average. Roughly 5% of students at Donner Trail Elementary qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. That share is noticeably below Nevada County's rate of about 43%.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Donner Trail Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 76.3%, the actual is 84.9%, a residual of +8.6 points.

Around the school, census data for Nevada County shows the typical household earns roughly $89,882 per year, roughly 42% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 7%. Across Nevada County's 46 public schools (combined enrollment of about 13,561 students), Donner Trail Elementary is one campus in the mix.

The closest other public school is Truckee Elementary, roughly 12.6 miles away. On composite proficiency, Donner Trail Elementary comes 1st of 5 in the immediate cluster, above the nearby-schools average of 55.4%.

Geographically, the school is in a countryside area.

Over the past 7-year window. Over the past 7-year window, the student count shrank 17%: 66 students in 2018 compared to 55 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share expanded from 86% to 95%. The student-to-teacher ratio fell from 22.0:1 in 2018 to 13.8:1 today.

On this page, members of the Donner Trail Elementary community share and discuss open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.