High Desert
School pathway
Test scores
CAASPP 2023-24 . % met or exceeded standardWhat this means: On the CAASPP, California's statewide test, about 29 of every 100 students at this school read and write at grade level and about 14 of 100 do math at grade level. Across all California schools, those numbers are about 47 and 36. Reading and writing scores are down about 15 points since 2014, while math scores are down about 13 points.
BeatsExpectations
Demographically-adjusted score · methodologyWhat this means: About 21% of students here test proficient in math and reading, below the roughly 37% typical for California schools with a similar share of low-income students. BeatsExpectations compares each school with others at the same poverty level, not by raw scores, so a school lands here when its results trail those comparable schools, which is not the same as having low scores. A higher-scoring school can still fall in this tier if similar schools score higher still.
7-year change
SY 2017-18 vs SY 2024-25About High Desert
High Desert operates as a compact middle-grades school in Acton, California, overseen by Acton-Agua Dulce Unified. Current enrollment sits at 307 students spanning grades 5 through 8. By comparison, California's public schools average about 659 students each, so High Desert sits 53% below that benchmark.
Acton-Agua Dulce Unified runs 3 schools in total, collectively educating 1,053 students. High Desert is one of those campuses.
In terms of who attends, High Desert lists that the largest single group is Hispanic, at 58% of enrollment. The remainder looks like 36% White. The wider county runs roughly 48% Hispanic, putting the school's mix considerably more Hispanic than the area baseline.
In terms of school funding signals, On paper, High Desert has 14 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 21.6:1. That figure is higher than the state norm's 20.7:1 average. An estimated 71% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal.
On a demographically-adjusted basis, High Desert is in the bottom 10% of California public schools. The BeatsExpectations model predicts schools with this FRL share to land around 37.0%; High Desert posts 21.4%, -15.6 points below that line.
In the surrounding community, the surrounding county (Los Angeles County) shows that 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), High Desert is one campus in the mix.
Nearest neighbor: iLEAD Hybrid, around 0.1 miles off. Within five miles, there are 4 other public schools. On composite proficiency, High Desert comes 7th of 7 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 32.6%.
Geographically, the school is in a small-town area.
Over the past 7-year window. Over the past 7-year window, the student count edged up 10%: 278 students in 2018 compared to 307 in 2025. White enrollment moved from 53% to 36% across the same window. Class-load math has rose: from 18.5:1 in 2018 to 21.6:1 in 2025.
On this page, recent activity here tends to focus on classroom updates, athletics, and weather closures. Members of the school community can share what they know.
Los Angeles County at a glance
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