Centennial Elementary

As a middle-of-the-pack K-5 school in OLYMPIA, Washington, Centennial Elementary teaches 434 students from grades pre-K through 5, operated by Olympia School District.

Centennial Elementary is one of 20 schools operated by Olympia School District, a district that teaches 9,386 students overall.

Looking at the student body, Centennial Elementary logs that the largest single group is White, at 58% of enrollment. Beyond that, the school logs 13% Hispanic, 13% multiracial, 10% Asian, 3% Black. By comparison, Thurston County as a whole is about 72% White, so the school skews visibly less White than its surroundings.

On the resource side, Centennial Elementary reports 24 full-time-equivalent teachers, putting the student-to-teacher ratio at about 17.8:1. That tracks the state average closely. Roughly 22% of students at Centennial Elementary qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a number frequently used as a low-income enrollment indicator. By comparison, Thurston County runs at roughly 43%, so the school's eligibility rate is meaningfully below the surrounding baseline.

Adjusting for the school's free-and-reduced-lunch share, Centennial Elementary performs roughly as the BeatsExpectations model predicts for a school with this FRL share. The predicted value is around 65.7%, the actual is 65.8%, a residual of +0.1 points.

Across the wider county, ACS estimates for Thurston County put the typical household earns roughly $96,563 per year, roughly 39% of adults have completed at least a four-year degree, and census figures put the poverty rate at about 6%. Across Thurston County's 86 public schools (combined enrollment of about 44,412 students), Centennial Elementary is one campus in the mix.

Nearest neighbor: McKenny Elementary, around 1.0 miles off. 8 of the 8 nearest public schools sit inside a five-mile radius. Among the 7 schools in that immediate cluster with test data (this one included), Centennial Elementary ranks 1st on composite proficiency, above the local average of 57.3%.

The school occupies a residential site.

Five-year trend. Over the past 7-year window, the student count declined 18%: 528 students in 2018 compared to 434 in 2025. Class-load math has pulled in: from 19.6:1 in 2018 to 17.8:1 in 2025.

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