Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary

As a medium-sized elementary school in Downey, California, Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary serves 641 students from grades K through 5, one of the schools within Downey Unified. Enrollment runs roughly 38% above the state mean of about 465.

Downey Unified comprises 21 schools with combined enrollment of 22,405 students; Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary is among them.

On the student-mix side, Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary logs that 86% of students identify as Hispanic, making the school strongly Hispanic-majority; the rest consists of 7% White, 4% Black. That is considerably more Hispanic than the county at large, where the share is closer to 48%.

Looking at school resources, The school reports having 29 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 22.1:1. The state averages about 22.3:1, putting this campus right in line with peers. Around 89% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. That share is higher than Los Angeles County's rate of about 70%.

On a residual basis (actual vs predicted given the student mix), Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 26.2%, the actual is 30.8%, a residual of +4.6 points.

Zooming out to the county, ACS estimates for Los Angeles County put the typical household earns roughly $90,112 per year, roughly 36% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and roughly 10% of residents live below the federal poverty line. In all, Los Angeles County runs 2244 public schools (combined enrollment of about 1,265,907 students), of which Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary is one.

The closest other public school is Columbus (Christopher) High, roughly 0.2 miles away. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary comes 7th of 7 in the immediate cluster, behind the nearby-schools average of 44.1%.

Gauldin (A.L.) Elementary operates from a bedroom-community location.

Looking at the recent track record. Over the past 7-year window, the student count expanded 7%: 597 students in 2018 compared to 641 in 2025. The student-to-teacher ratio tightened from 24.7:1 in 2018 to 22.1:1 today.

Inside the community feed, posts here usually surface around pickup logistics, teacher feedback, and after-school programs. Members of the school community can share what they know.