Golden Elementary

Set in Placentia, California, Golden Elementary is a high-enrollment K-5 school, one of the schools within Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified. It instructs 834 students across grades K through 6. That puts it 79% bigger than the typical public school in California, which averages around 465 students.

Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified runs 34 schools in total, collectively educating 22,665 students. Golden Elementary is one of those campuses.

Demographically, Golden Elementary shows that 53% of students identify as Asian, with the remaining enrollment distributed across several groups. The remainder comes out to 19% White, 17% Hispanic, 9% multiracial. By comparison, Orange County as a whole is about 22% Asian, so the school skews considerably more Asian than its surroundings.

In terms of school funding signals, Staff filings list 31 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 26.5:1 students per teacher. The state averages around 22.3:1, so this campus is higher than the state norm typical. Around 24% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. By comparison, Orange County runs at roughly 55%, so the school's eligibility rate is below the surrounding baseline.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Golden Elementary ranks in the top 10% of California public schools. The BeatsExpectations model, a per-state regression of composite proficiency on FRL share, predicts schools with this student profile to land around 65.3%; Golden Elementary posts 90.8%, +25.5 points above that line.

Across the wider county, the surrounding county (Orange County) records that median household earnings sit near $116,289, 44% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and roughly 7% of residents live below the federal poverty line. Across Orange County's 649 public schools (combined enrollment of about 430,458 students), Golden Elementary is one campus in the mix.

George Key is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.1 miles from this campus. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Golden Elementary. Among the 6 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), Golden Elementary ranks 1st on composite proficiency, ahead of the local average of 67.1%.

The campus sits in a residential setting.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Golden Elementary has changed only slightly, going from 823 students in 2018 to 834 in 2025. The White share of enrollment shrank from 30% to 19% over that span. The student-to-teacher ratio pulled in from 29.4:1 in 2018 to 26.5:1 today.

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