Thomas Jefferson Middle

Thomas Jefferson Middle is one of the medium-sized middle-grades schools in Indio, California, run under Desert Sands Unified, with 591 students on its rolls from grades 6 through 8.

Desert Sands Unified runs 34 schools in total, collectively educating 25,613 students. Thomas Jefferson Middle is one of those campuses.

Looking at the student body, Thomas Jefferson Middle logs that the student body is overwhelmingly Hispanic (91%); the rest breaks down as 5% multiracial, 2% White. By comparison, Riverside County as a whole is about 51% Hispanic, so the school skews considerably more Hispanic than its surroundings.

Looking at school resources, Staff filings list 22 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 27.0:1 students per teacher. The state averages around 20.7:1, so this campus is higher than the state norm typical. About 92% of enrolled students meet the income threshold for free or reduced-price lunch, often used as a Title I proxy. That share is north of Riverside County's rate of about 74%.

With demographic context factored in, Thomas Jefferson Middle performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 25.6%, the actual is 11.5%, a residual of -14.1 points.

In the surrounding community, the surrounding county (Riverside County) logs that the typical household earns roughly $93,074 per year, roughly 26% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and roughly 8% of residents live below the federal poverty line. Across Riverside County's 543 public schools (combined enrollment of about 424,872 students), Thomas Jefferson Middle is one campus in the mix.

Theodore Roosevelt Elementary is the nearest neighboring public school, about 0.4 miles from this campus. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Thomas Jefferson Middle. On composite proficiency, Thomas Jefferson Middle comes 7th of 7 in the immediate cluster, beneath the nearby-schools average of 23.4%.

Geographically, the school is in a residential area.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count decreased 9%: 653 students in 2018 compared to 591 in 2025. The student-to-teacher ratio loosened from 25.8:1 in 2018 to 27.0:1 today.

Within the allk12 community for this school, recent activity here tends to focus on enrollment questions, classroom assignments, and PTA news. Members of the school community can share what they know.