La Joya Elementary

La Joya Elementary is one of the mid-sized elementary campuss in Salinas, California, operated by Santa Rita Union Elementary, with 498 students on its rolls from grades K through 5.

Santa Rita Union Elementary runs 6 schools in total, collectively educating 3,088 students. La Joya Elementary is one of those campuses.

Looking at the student body, La Joya Elementary logs that the student body is overwhelmingly Hispanic (92%). Beyond that, the school shows 6% White. By comparison, Monterey County as a whole is about 62% Hispanic, so the school skews visibly more Hispanic than its surroundings.

On the income-and-resources front, On paper, La Joya Elementary has 22 full-time-equivalent teachers, translating to a class-load average of around 22.6:1. That tracks the state average closely. Roughly 89% of students at La Joya Elementary qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. Set against Monterey County (around 76%), the school's rate is north of typical.

After controlling for student poverty, La Joya Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 26.6%, the actual is 23.2%, a residual of -3.4 points.

In the broader community, Monterey County reports that median household income runs about $97,230, 28% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 10%. In all, Monterey County runs 153 public schools (combined enrollment of about 73,845 students), of which La Joya Elementary is one.

Nearest neighbor: John Gutierrez Middle, around 0.1 miles off. Within five miles, there are 8 other public schools. On composite proficiency, La Joya Elementary comes 4th of 9 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 23.7%.

The school occupies a commuter-belt site.

Trend over the last 7 years. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at La Joya Elementary has contracted 8%, going from 544 students in 2018 to 498 in 2025. Hispanic enrollment moved from 85% to 92% across the same window. The student-to-teacher ratio fell from 27.2:1 in 2018 to 22.6:1 today.

On this page, members of the La Joya Elementary community share and discuss school events, parent volunteer needs, and clubs. The community welcomes input from current and former families.