San Lorenzo Valley High

San Lorenzo Valley High is a tight-knit four-year high school in Felton, California, part of San Lorenzo Valley Unified. The school works with 578 students in grades 9 through 12. By comparison, California's public schools average about 838 students each, so San Lorenzo Valley High sits 31% leaner than that benchmark.

San Lorenzo Valley Unified runs 5 schools in total, collectively educating 2,228 students. San Lorenzo Valley High is one of those campuses.

On demographics, San Lorenzo Valley High lists that 80% of students identify as White, making the school strongly White-majority. The remainder reads as 12% Hispanic, 6% multiracial. The wider county runs roughly 60% White, putting the school's mix visibly more White than the area baseline.

On the income-and-resources front, Staff filings list 27 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 21.1:1 students per teacher. That figure is higher than the state norm's 18.2:1 average. About 20% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly cited indicator of low-income enrollment. By comparison, Santa Cruz County runs at roughly 52%, so the school's eligibility rate is below the surrounding baseline.

On a demographically-adjusted basis, San Lorenzo Valley High sits in the middle band of the BeatsExpectations distribution. Schools with this campus's student mix typically land near 67.5%; this one delivers 58.4%.

In the area at large, census data for Santa Cruz County shows median household earnings sit near $111,093, about 44% of the adult population holds a bachelor's degree or above, and the poverty rate sits near 6%. Across Santa Cruz County's 83 public schools (combined enrollment of about 36,316 students), San Lorenzo Valley High is one campus in the mix.

San Lorenzo Valley Elementary is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.1 miles from this campus. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. On composite proficiency, San Lorenzo Valley High comes 5th of 8 in the immediate cluster, above the nearby-schools average of 55.2%.

Geographically, the school is in a rural area.

Over the past 7-year window. San Lorenzo Valley High's enrollment has contracted 20% since 2018, when it stood at 726 (now 578). The White share of enrollment edged up from 76% to 80% over that span. Class-load math has fell: from 24.8:1 in 2018 to 21.1:1 in 2025.

On the community side, posts here usually surface around fundraisers, lost-and-found posts, and report-card season. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.