Summerland Elementary: Most kids here clear the bar, year after year. The question is what happens after that.
Summerland posts 73% meeting the standard, and 45.5% going well past it. Most kids here keep up. Fewer get pushed further. Ask the school what it does for a child who already finds the work easy.
| Scope | % Exceeded | % Met+ | Growth | Absence | Suspension | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| This school | 62 | 45% | 73% | — | 16.4% | 0.9% |
| CA average · Elementary School | 39 | 21% | 43% | — | 17.9% | 1.6% |
Summerland Elementary scores 62 of 100 on SchoolScope's Scope Score — the 89th percentile of 5,721 California elementary schools (CDE CAASPP 2025).
Measures test performance, attendance, and climate — not arts, community, or your kid. How we score →
💪 Strong All-Around — Ask about what we don't score — class size, electives, the feel of a classroom — strong numbers everywhere on paper don't mean every classroom feels the same.
Most rating sites would stop at “73% proficient” and call it done. Summerland deserves a closer read. The school sits in Summerland, where one in four students qualify for free or reduced lunch — and reading the numbers without that context misreads the school.
The 4 things our score weighs
California's own answer to the same question
California runs its own growth model — it follows individual children in grades 4 through 8 and compares each one against a prediction from their own prior scores. On that measure this school sits well above the middle of California elementary schools in reading and math together. We show it; we don't score it.
— pts vs expected is scale-score points above or below what California's model predicted for these same children from their own prior-year scores. It is not a percentage and not a percent of anything. A typical California elementary school lands at +2 in reading, and the middle half of them fall between −5 and +9 — the spread is wide, so read the rank, not the sign. CDE blends two consecutive years into each published figure, so adjacent years share input data and no year-over-year trend can honestly be drawn from them. It covers grades 4-8 only, and it is not part of the Scope Score — we assessed it and left it out: it tracks school demographics roughly three times as strongly as our own growth measure does, and one published year is not enough to test how stable it is.
Ask how the school challenges kids who clear the standard early. The gap between meeting and exceeding is where pacing shows.
- Ask which schools families here actually choose next — the zoned path is only the default.
- Ask whether the tour can step into a working classroom — watch how the teacher handles a student who's stuck.
- Ask to tour while school's in session, and notice how hallways and transitions feel — culture shows up between classes, not just in them.
- Ask how the school communicates with families when a child starts to struggle.
- Ask what a typical day looks like for a new student in the first few weeks.
Showing up, and staying in class
Where the path goes
The zoned path continues to Carpinteria Middle, which scores 33 points lower than this school — worth weighing alongside everything above. Families here often look at charter or magnet options for middle school.
Feeder patterns derived from NCES attendance boundary data. Boundaries are approximate and may have changed — verify with your school district for current assignments.
The road from this school ends at Carpinteria Senior High, which sent 11 graduates to UC campuses last fall and teaches 11 AP subjects. Those numbers describe past cohorts — a child starting here today would reach Carpinteria Senior High around 2035, and 10 years is a long time for a school to hold still, and by the state's 2023 count 82% of Carpinteria Senior High's graduates enrolled in college somewhere, UC or not.
The people teaching here
Pay is set by the district, not the school.
What gets spent here
The district's current expense of education per student, from CDE's annual SACS filing — the freshest district spending figure the state publishes.
District-level, from the district's own SACS general-ledger filing — school-by-school breakdowns aren't published by the state.
Source: NCES F-33 · Full district breakdown →
The neighborhood it serves
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2024) · ZIP-level
At 51 students, this school is much smaller than the typical California elementary school (≈480).
On the state's science test (CAST), 55% met or exceeded the standard — science is tested in grades 5 and 8 and once in high school, and it never enters the Scope Score.
Frequently asked questions
Is Summerland Elementary a good elementary school?
What are Summerland Elementary's CAASPP test scores?
How does Summerland Elementary rank in California?
What is the attendance and school culture like at Summerland Elementary?
How does Summerland Elementary compare to other schools in Summerland?
What middle school does Summerland Elementary feed into?
Your other options
Private alternatives nearby
Private schools within ~10 miles. These schools do not participate in state testing and cannot be scored or ranked.
Every number on this page
Score factors, grade-level breakdowns, subgroup proficiency, and nearest schools.
| ELA | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT | MET+ | +/CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 3 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Grade 4 | 9 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Grade 5 | 11 | 55% | 9% | 27% | 9% | 64% | +16 |
| Math | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT | MET+ | +/CA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 3 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Grade 4 | 9 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Grade 5 | 11 | 36% | 45% | 18% | 0% | 82% | +47 |
We show the grade rows CDE publishes for this school. A missing grade or dash can mean the school does not serve that grade, no valid result was published, or the tested group was too small to report. It does not mean zero.
| Science (CAST) | Tested | EXC | MET | NEAR | NOT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Schoolwide | 11 | 9% | 45% | 45% | 0% |
CAST is tested in grades 5 and 8, then once in grade 10, 11, or 12. This row is the school's all-student aggregate. Not part of the Scope Score.
| School | Dist | Scope | EXC | MET+ | Grade gap | Cohort growth | Susp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summerland Elementary ← | — | 62 | 45.5% | 72.7% | — | — | 0.9% |
| Montecito Union | 2.2 mi | 89 | 69.1% | 91.4% | +3.1pp | — | 1.2% |
| California average | — | 39 | 21.4% | 42.7% | −2.9pp | — | 1.6% |
- — Growth data isn't available — the state needs matched grades across years to compute it.
- — No subgroup comparison could be shown for this school this year — either its group sizes fall under CDE's 15-student reporting floor, or district/state comparison data wasn't available for its groups.
| Group | 2019 | 2025 | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Female | 3.6% | 13.6% | +10.0pp |
| Male | 7.1% | 14.7% | +7.6pp |
| All Students | 5.4% | 14.3% | +8.9pp |
| Hispanic/Latino | — | 9.1% | — |
| Socioeconomically Disadvantaged | — | 6.7% | — |
| Group | Reading | n | CDE band | Math | n | CDE band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Students | +23 | 18 | Exceptional | +20 | 18 | Exceptional |
| English Only | +26 | 16 | not categorised | +22 | 16 | not categorised |
| White | +24 | 14 | Exceptional | +21 | 14 | Exceptional |
Whole scale-score points above or below what CDE's model predicted for these same children from their own prior-year scores — not a percentage, not a percentile. Statewide a typical school lands near +1 with a spread of about 13 points either side, so read a figure against its group's own typical value, not against zero. Muted rows have fewer than 30 students with a growth score — published by CDE, held back from the narrative sections above because at that size the figure swings about 17 points on its own. “Not categorised” is CDE assigning no band — English Only, Recently Reclassified, and English Learners Only receive a value and no band, for every school in the state. It is not a missing number. Most figures blend two consecutive years, so adjacent published years share input data and no trend line can honestly be drawn across them. A group absent from this table had fewer than 11 students with a growth score and was never published. Grades 4-8 only. None of this enters the Scope Score — it is more strongly correlated with school demographics than our own growth measure, and one published year is not enough to test its reliability.
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