Toluca Lake Elementary, North Hollywood CA

Original Research by School Decision on Toluca Lake Elementary

Toluca Lake Elementary serves kindergarten through fifth grade in North Hollywood, a neighborhood anchored by the NoHo Arts District with its theaters, galleries, music studios, and creative culture. The school sits on Cahuenga Boulevard in a mixed-use setting that blends artist-driven urban blocks with quieter residential streets of single-family homes and apartments. The surrounding area is in the midst of substantial transit-oriented development, including a major residential project near the North Hollywood Metro station and a 25-acre mixed-use redevelopment of a former mall site.

The school's enrollment is small for its grade band, with roughly even distributions across kindergarten through fifth grade. A substantial majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the enrollment is predominantly Hispanic with a meaningful presence of white, multiracial, Black, and Asian students. The racial composition reflects the broader Los Angeles County diversity.

Academic performance in reading and language arts (ELA) is the school's relative strength. Fifth-grade performance notably exceeds the school's third and fourth grades, and overall ELA proficiency across tested grades sits meaningfully higher than math. Math proficiency is consistently below reading, with fourth grade showing the weakest results. Science proficiency, available only for fifth grade, shows marked difficulty in that subject. When proficiency rates across tested subjects and grades are averaged, the school performs above the midpoint among districts in Los Angeles County, which speaks to uneven but decent overall standing given that it is a single elementary school in a large, varied county system.

The one-year snapshot in the data limits what can be said about trajectory. State testing data was available for 2024-25 only, so trends cannot be assessed. Chronic absenteeism data and graduation rate (applicable only to high school) were not available for this elementary school, and counts of students receiving special education services or classified as English learners were not provided in the data, so a reader may want to ask the school directly about those populations and any targeted support they receive.

North Hollywood's housing market in the surrounding zip code carries substantial cost. Home values are high relative to national and state medians, and rental prices are steep as a share of household income. Recent year-over-year changes show modest declines, but the affordability gap remains steep. Families relocating or purchasing in the area face significant housing costs alongside the property tax increase from Measure US, LAUSD's record school facilities bond, which will add roughly forty dollars per year per thousand dollars of assessed value for decades to fund building repairs and upgrades across the district.

LAUSD, the parent district, has adopted an all-day cellphone ban including lunch and breaks, implemented February 2025, which shapes daily school culture and student-parent communication. The district has also revised its Black Student Achievement Plan to broaden eligibility and boost funding, a change that may affect curriculum and support staffing at this school.

The school is a regular public school with no charter or magnet designation. Program information beyond the academic core was not available in the data. A parent or resident considering this school may want to contact the school directly to learn about extracurricular offerings, arts programming given the neighborhood's creative character, and how the school approaches English learners and students with disabilities, since those details were not in the available record.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 356%

School 56% · District 48% · ▲ 9 pts above district

▲ 13 pts above state median · ▲ 10 pts above county median

Grade 445%

School 45% · District 43% · ▲ 2 pts above district

▲ 7 pts above state median · ▲ 4 pts above county median

Grade 551%

School 51% · District 36% · ▲ 14 pts above district

▲ 20 pts above state median · ▲ 17 pts above county median

English language arts

Grade 361%

School 61% · District 44% · ▲ 18 pts above district

▲ 21 pts above state median · ▲ 19 pts above county median

Grade 454%

School 54% · District 45% · ▲ 9 pts above district

▲ 12 pts above state median · ▲ 10 pts above county median

Grade 571%

School 71% · District 47% · ▲ 24 pts above district

▲ 25 pts above state median · ▲ 24 pts above county median

Science

Grade 543%

School 43% · District 29% · ▲ 13 pts above district

▲ 14 pts above state median · ▲ 15 pts above county median

This schoolLos Angeles Unified, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.

Proficiency by household income

English language arts

Grade 3Lower-income53%Higher-income77%25 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income52%Higher-income58%6 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income66%Higher-income82%16 pp gap

Mathematics

Grade 3Lower-income49%Higher-income70%21 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income38%Higher-income63%25 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income43%Higher-income68%25 pp gap