La Merced Academy

La Merced Academy is a primary school of moderately sized scale in Montebello, California, run under Montebello Unified, enrolling 665 students in grades K through 8. Enrollment runs roughly 43% above the state mean of about 465.

Montebello Unified comprises 29 schools with combined enrollment of 19,149 students; La Merced Academy is among them.

On demographics, La Merced Academy shows that nearly all students (97%) are Hispanic. By comparison, Los Angeles County as a whole is about 48% Hispanic, so the school skews noticeably more Hispanic than its surroundings.

Looking at school resources, La Merced Academy reports 30 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 22.0:1. That tracks the state average closely. An estimated 74% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, La Merced Academy performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 35.6%, the actual is 37.0%, a residual of +1.4 points.

Around the school, Los Angeles County reports that median household earnings sit near $90,112, roughly 36% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 10%. Across Los Angeles County's 2244 public schools (combined enrollment of about 1,265,907 students), La Merced Academy is one campus in the mix.

La Merced Intermediate is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.2 miles from this campus. Within five miles, there are 8 other public schools. Ranking that nearby cluster on reported proficiency puts La Merced Academy at 2nd of 9; the average score across the group is 30.9%.

La Merced Academy operates from a bedroom-community location.

Trend over the last 7 years. Over the past 7-year window, the student count edged down 14%: 777 students in 2018 compared to 665 in 2025. Class-load math has fell: from 24.3:1 in 2018 to 22.0:1 in 2025.

In the discussion threads here, recent activity here tends to focus on fundraisers, lost-and-found posts, and report-card season. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.