California school safety

A district here can be one elementary school and a middle school. California splits its public schools among 2,084 separate districts, and most of them are small — which shapes this page more than anything else on it. To rank a district, we need enough of its schools to carry a score of their own, and only 332 districts in the state clear that bar. The rest are not unranked because something went wrong. They are unranked because a ranking built on two or three schools would not tell you much.

Here is what the page can tell you. The 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection covers 10,432 California schools. For 6,533 of them we publish a safety score, meaning their reported incident records held up against roughly 1,500 schools nationally that are closest to them in enrollment and teach the same grades. Where a school shows no score, we could not confirm its record. It reported little or nothing, and we will not turn that silence into a number.

1,271 schools, or 12.2% of the state, land in our doubtful range. The same share nationally is 11.3%. Those two are close, and the small gap is a difference in paperwork, not in children's safety. We do not adjust the comparison by state, and states differ in how carefully they file. A doubtful grade means schools of the same size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this one reported almost none — records we cannot verify. It is not a finding of violence. No school on this site is being called dangerous. Small schools that reported nothing get a middle grade instead, because at that size a genuine zero is common, which is a reason to draw no conclusion in either direction.

The districts that rank highest

Los Alamitos Unified, Redondo Beach Unified, San Marcos Unified and Hawthorne each come out safer than 99% of ranked US districts. Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified is safer than 97%. Those standings rest only on the schools we could score. In Hawthorne, all 11 schools in the district's scored set have data complete enough to score. In Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified, 8 of 18 do. Similar standing, different amounts of evidence underneath it — worth knowing before you lean on either one.

Safest ranked cities in California

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every California city with schools

Every California school district