Kennedy Gardens Elementary

Located at 2300 Rockwood Ave., in Calexico, California, Kennedy Gardens Elementary is a mid-tier elementary school that caters to 484 students (grades K through 6), one of the schools within Calexico Unified.

Within Calexico Unified, which oversees 12 schools and 8,022 students, Kennedy Gardens Elementary is one campus in the system.

On the student-mix side, Kennedy Gardens Elementary logs that the student body is overwhelmingly Hispanic (98%). The wider county runs roughly 86% Hispanic, putting the school's mix meaningfully more Hispanic than the area baseline.

In terms of school funding signals, Staff filings list 20 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 24.2:1 students per teacher. That figure is higher than the state norm's 22.3:1 average. An estimated 93% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly cited indicator of low-income enrollment. By comparison, Imperial County runs at roughly 77%, so the school's eligibility rate is meaningfully above the surrounding baseline.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Kennedy Gardens Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 23.9%, the actual is 12.7%, a residual of -11.2 points.

Across the wider county, the surrounding county (Imperial County) reports that the typical household earns roughly $57,681 per year, 16% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 17%. In all, Imperial County runs 76 public schools (combined enrollment of about 36,513 students), of which Kennedy Gardens Elementary is one.

Nearest neighbor: Rockwood Elementary, around 0.9 miles off. Within five miles, there are 8 other public schools. Among the 8 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), Kennedy Gardens Elementary ranks 8th on composite proficiency, beneath the local average of 22.4%.

Geographically, the school is in a small-town area.

Trend over the last 7 years. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Kennedy Gardens Elementary has edged down 18%, going from 591 students in 2018 to 484 in 2025.

Inside the community feed, posts here usually surface around science fair prep, picture-day reminders, and bus-route questions. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.