The top reported proficiency rate is 57% in Math. The lowest is 14% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Bandini Street Elementary
Bandini Street Elementary sits on North Bandini Street in San Pedro, the port neighborhood anchoring the southern tip of Los Angeles. It serves kindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school within Los Angeles Unified, drawing from a community whose working-class, multi-generational identity is bound up with the Port of Los Angeles and the maritime trades that shaped the neighborhood over generations.
The school is small for a K-5 campus, and its student body is overwhelmingly Hispanic, reflecting the demographics of the surrounding residential streets. A very large share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which tells you this is a high-poverty campus by any measure. Data on English learner enrollment and students with IEPs was not available in the information reviewed here, so families with those needs may want to ask the school directly about support staffing and programming.
On the 2024-25 California state assessments, math scores hold up better than English language arts across the tested grades. Third and fourth graders show majority proficiency in math, while fifth grade drops below that threshold. In ELA, proficiency sits below half across all three tested grades, with third grade the weakest point. The fifth-grade science result on the CAST is low, well short of what the other subjects show. Placed against districts across Los Angeles County using the county comparison set, the school's overall proficiency index lands just below the county midpoint, which means it is performing close to the middle of a very large and diverse field but not yet above it. A parent who wants to understand whether current proficiency trends are improving or declining should ask the school, because only a single year of data was available here and no trend comparison could be computed.
No program offerings, course access details, or attendance and discipline figures were in the data reviewed. Those are real gaps for a family trying to picture daily school life, and they are worth raising directly with the front office or at an upcoming school event.
The neighborhood context is worth understanding on its own terms. San Pedro is genuinely urban and working-class, with dense rental housing alongside hillside single-family streets, a walkable downtown core around Pacific Avenue that has local restaurants, galleries, and the historic Warner Grand Theatre, and a waterfront that is currently being remade. The West Harbor project, a large food hall and public waterfront park on the former Ports O' Call site, is publicly reported to be nearing completion. Inland, the Ponte Vista master-planned community is being built out on a former naval housing site, adding new single-family homes to the west side of the neighborhood.
Housing near the school is expensive relative to national norms. Home values in the zip code are well above the California statewide median, and rents are high enough that rental costs consume a very large share of a typical household's income at current rates. Values edged slightly downward in the past year. Families considering a purchase also need to account for Measure US, a major school facilities bond that Los Angeles voters approved, which is publicly reported as the largest in LAUSD's history. Repaid through property taxes over a long horizon, it will add to the cost of owning property in the district for years to come.
At the district level, LAUSD implemented a full school-day ban on cellphones, smartwatches, and earbuds beginning in early 2025, a change that reshapes how students and parents communicate during school hours. The district has also overhauled and expanded its Black Student Achievement Plan, which funds counselors, climate advocates, and culturally responsive curriculum at priority campuses; families curious whether Bandini Street is among the targeted schools should ask the district.
For a family living in San Pedro and enrolling a child in the elementary grades, Bandini Street is a neighborhood school embedded in the port community, with math scores that hold up reasonably well in the early grades, ELA and science results that represent a genuine area to watch, and meaningful support data that is simply not yet on the record here.
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