Topanga Elementary Charter

Topanga Elementary Charter, an intimate elementary campus in Topanga, California, overseen by Los Angeles Unified, serves 232 students, covering grades K through 5. That puts it 50% smaller than the typical public school in California, which averages around 465 students.

Los Angeles Unified runs 784 schools in total, collectively educating 406,887 students. Topanga Elementary Charter is one of those campuses.

Looking at the student body, Topanga Elementary Charter lists that 62% of the student body identifies as White; the rest comes out to 20% multiracial, 16% Hispanic, 3% Asian. By comparison, Los Angeles County as a whole is about 31% White, so the school skews meaningfully more White than its surroundings.

Looking at the economic backdrop, The school reports having 11 full-time-equivalent teachers, for a student-teacher ratio near 21.1:1. That figure is tighter than the state norm's 22.3:1 average. Around 26% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, which schools and policymakers use as a rough income-mix signal. By comparison, Los Angeles County runs at roughly 70%, so the school's eligibility rate is lower than the surrounding baseline.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Topanga Elementary Charter performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 64.1%, the actual is 73.2%, a residual of +9.1 points.

In the surrounding community, community-level numbers for Los Angeles County indicate median household earnings sit near $90,112, roughly 36% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and the poverty rate sits near 10%. Topanga Elementary Charter is one of 2244 public schools in Los Angeles County (combined enrollment of about 1,265,907 students).

Nearest neighbor: Calabasas High, around 3.5 miles off. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Topanga Elementary Charter. On composite proficiency, Topanga Elementary Charter comes 2nd of 9 in the immediate cluster, ahead of the nearby-schools average of 64.0%.

Topanga Elementary Charter operates from an outlying location. As a public charter, Topanga Elementary Charter runs on public funding but with greater curricular and operational autonomy than a typical district school.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count shrank 21%: 295 students in 2018 compared to 232 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share fell from 80% to 62%. The student-to-teacher ratio narrowed from 22.7:1 in 2018 to 21.1:1 today.

Inside the community feed, members of the Topanga Elementary Charter community share and discuss fundraisers, lost-and-found posts, and report-card season. Contributors range from current parents to recent graduates and teachers.