Tenaya Elementary, Groveland CA - Test Scores & Data

Original Research by School Decision on Tenaya Elementary

Tenaya Elementary sits on Highway 120 in Groveland, a small Gold Rush-era town in the Sierra Nevada foothills that serves as the last real commercial stop before Yosemite's Big Oak Flat entrance. The school runs from kindergarten through eighth grade, which means it is a child's entire K-8 experience before they move on to Tioga High School. The district it belongs to, Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified, stretches for an extraordinary distance along the Tuolumne River corridor, covering communities from Groveland east through Big Oak Flat, Moccasin, and into the Don Pedro area. This is genuinely rural California, where the school is a central institution in a community with a walkable historic downtown but car-dependent surroundings.

The school is small for its grade span, drawing students from kindergarten through eighth grade in a setting where each class cohort is modest in size. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the economic character of a rural foothill community. The student body is predominantly white, with a meaningful Hispanic population and small numbers of other groups. Data on English learners and students receiving special education services were not available in the materials provided.

On state assessments, the picture is a challenging one and deserves plain description. Across both English language arts and math on the California CAASPP Smarter Balanced exam, proficiency rates across tested grades are low, and in nearly every grade and subject the rates sit well below what most California schools report. Math is particularly thin, with most tested grades showing only a small fraction of students reaching the proficient-or-above threshold; fifth-grade math and ELA both came in near the floor. Seventh grade ELA was a relative bright spot, and fourth grade ELA was the single grade where roughly half of students scored proficient or above, but even that sits against a backdrop of weaker results across the other grades. Science results on the CAST mirror the same pattern. When placed among districts in Tuolumne County, Tenaya's overall proficiency index lands in the bottom quartile of that comparison set. A parent considering this school should plan to ask the school directly what academic supports are in place, where individual students tend to need the most help, and what the plan looks like for students who are not yet proficient. The data here makes that conversation worth having early.

Trend data is limited to a single year, so there is no multi-year trajectory to read. It is not possible from these numbers alone to say whether results are improving, declining, or stable. Graduation rate is not applicable here since Tenaya serves only through eighth grade.

The housing market around Groveland is priced meaningfully below the California state benchmark, though above the national median. Home values in the area pulled back slightly over the past year. No rental data was available. Wildfire risk is a real consideration publicly reported for essentially all properties in the area, and some flood exposure exists as well. The housing stock is mostly older detached single-family homes, a pattern rooted in the mid-twentieth-century buildout of the Pine Mountain Lake planned community adjacent to town. Inventory tends to be constrained. For families considering a move into the area, the Groveland-Columbia Express, a publicly reported free transit line that launched in 2022, now connects Mary Laveroni Community Park in Groveland to Sonora and Columbia College, which is the nearest community college and a meaningful resource for older students and adults.

Publicly reported district information shows a long-running enrollment decline over recent years, which is worth noting for a school already small. No major bond measures, curriculum overhauls, or other discrete changes were confirmed from district sources during the research for this profile, so there is little to report on that front.

Tenaya Elementary fits a family that wants a single K-8 school in a tight-knit rural community with genuine mountain character and proximity to Yosemite. The academic results as reported are a soft spot that deserves direct follow-up with the school.

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Academic performance

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

Math

Grade 311%

School 11% · District 11%

▼ 32 pts below state median · ▼ 34 pts below county median

Grade 422%

School 22% · District 22%

▼ 15 pts below state median · ▼ 11 pts below county median

Grade 50%

School 0% · District 0%

▼ 30 pts below state median · ▼ 22 pts below county median

Grade 69%

School 9% · District 9%

▼ 21 pts below state median · ▼ 18 pts below county median

Grade 719%

School 19% · District 19%

▼ 11 pts below state median · ▼ 12 pts below county median

Grade 84%

School 4% · District 4%

▼ 24 pts below state median · ▼ 25 pts below county median

English language arts

Grade 316%

School 16% · District 16%

▼ 25 pts below state median · ▼ 22 pts below county median

Grade 450%

School 50% · District 50%

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

Grade 55%

School 5% · District 5%

▼ 40 pts below state median · ▼ 30 pts below county median

Grade 618%

School 18% · District 18%

▼ 26 pts below state median · ▼ 22 pts below county median

Grade 744%

School 44% · District 44%

▼ 2 pts below state median · ▼ 10 pts below county median

Grade 823%

School 23% · District 23%

▼ 21 pts below state median · ▼ 21 pts below county median

Science

Grade 55%

School 5% · District 5%

▼ 23 pts below state median · ▼ 25 pts below county median

Grade 812%

School 12% · District 12%

▼ 14 pts below state median · ▼ 25 pts below county median

Social studies

Grade 829%

School 29% · District 28% · ▲ 1 pts above district

▼ 20 pts below state median

This schoolBig Oak Flat-Groveland 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.