Ponderosa Elementary

As a high-enrollment elementary school in Anaheim, California, Ponderosa Elementary caters to 785 students from grades K through 6, part of Anaheim Elementary. That puts it 69% bigger than the typical public school in California, which averages around 465 students.

Anaheim Elementary comprises 24 schools with combined enrollment of 13,964 students; Ponderosa Elementary is among them.

Looking at the student body, Ponderosa Elementary logs that nearly all students (89%) are Hispanic. Beyond that, the school reports 4% multiracial, 3% Asian, 2% White. By comparison, Orange County as a whole is about 34% Hispanic, so the school skews visibly more Hispanic than its surroundings.

Looking at the economic backdrop, Staff filings list 32 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 24.9:1 students per teacher. That figure is higher than the state norm's 22.3:1 average. About 67% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. By comparison, Orange County runs at roughly 55%, so the school's eligibility rate is meaningfully above the surrounding baseline.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Ponderosa Elementary falls in the UNDERPERFORMING tier of the BeatsExpectations residual. Given its student profile, a typical campus would land near 39.4%; this one comes in at 14.7%, -24.7 points off the demographic line.

In the area at large, ACS estimates for Orange County put the typical household earns roughly $116,289 per year, 44% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 7%. Across Orange County's 649 public schools (combined enrollment of about 430,458 students), Ponderosa Elementary is one campus in the mix.

Earl Warren Elementary is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.7 miles from this campus. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, Ponderosa Elementary comes 8th of 8 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 39.1%.

The campus sits in a downtown setting.

Five-year trend. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Ponderosa Elementary has contracted 24%, going from 1,031 students in 2018 to 785 in 2025. Hispanic enrollment moved from 93% to 89% across the same window. The student-to-teacher ratio fell from 27.5:1 in 2018 to 24.9:1 today.

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