Clay El Sch

Clay El Sch operates as a mid-sized elementary school in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, run under Ephrata Area SD. Current enrollment sits at 377 students spanning grades K through 4.

Ephrata Area SD comprises 7 schools with combined enrollment of 3,904 students; Clay El Sch is among them.

In terms of who attends, Clay El Sch reports that 75% of the student body identifies as White. The remainder looks like 11% Hispanic, 7% multiracial, 3% Black, 3% Asian.

On the resource side, Staff filings list 29 full-time-equivalent teachers, which works out to roughly 13.1:1 students per teacher. That tracks the state average closely. Roughly 49% of students at Clay El Sch qualify 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, Clay El Sch sits in the middle band of the BeatsExpectations distribution. Schools with this campus's student mix typically land near 56.7%; this one delivers 64.6%.

In the surrounding community, the surrounding county (Lancaster County) logs that the typical household earns roughly $86,959 per year, 32% of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, and the poverty rate sits near 5%. Across Lancaster County's 114 public schools (combined enrollment of about 62,719 students), Clay El Sch is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: Ephrata MS, around 3.4 miles off. Counting just inside five miles, 8 other public schools cluster around Clay El Sch. On composite proficiency, Clay El Sch comes 4th of 9 in the immediate cluster, above the nearby-schools average of 59.8%.

The campus sits in a rural setting.

Looking at the recent track record. Looking back 7 years, enrollment at Clay El Sch has ticked down 19%, going from 465 students in 2018 to 377 in 2025. Over the same period, the White share fell from 81% to 75%. The student-to-teacher ratio tightened from 15.7:1 in 2018 to 13.1:1 today.

On allk12, recent activity here tends to focus on open house dates, ride-share offers, and field-trip permission slips. Anyone with firsthand experience at this school can post or comment.