01School Districts
Six Districts.
From Palo Alto to Atherton, a profile of every district that shapes school-motivated home decisions on the Peninsula and in Silicon Valley — ratings, feeder patterns, and the housing market around each.
02Atlas
Choose a District.
Each profile aggregates the school list, feeder structure, neighborhoods, and home-price ranges. Read the district view first; then drill into specific schools to test whether the headline reputation matches what your family actually needs.
Palo Alto Unified School District
Santa Clara · 11,600+ students · K-12
PAUSD anchors Stanford's neighborhood; Gunn and Paly rank consistently among the top public high schools in the United States.
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Cupertino Union SD + Fremont Union HSD
Santa Clara · 24,000+ students · K-12
CUSD into FUHSD produces some of the densest STEM outcomes in California — Monta Vista and Lynbrook lead the metric set.
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Los Altos SD + Mountain View-Los Altos Union HSD
Santa Clara · 5,000+ students · K-12
A smaller, balanced K-8 (LASD) feeding MVLA — academic depth without the pressure-cooker reputation of larger districts.
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Menlo Park City SD + Sequoia Union HSD
San Mateo · 3,000+ students · K-12
Tree-lined K-8 feeding M-A High; Oak Knoll and Encinal are perennial picks, with a deep private-school bench nearby.
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Hillsborough City School District / San Mateo Union High School District
San Mateo · 800+ (K-8 HCSD) students · K-12
Three K-8 elementary schools (North, South, West) and an unusually high private-high-school capture rate. Quiet money, long tenure.
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Las Lomitas Elementary School District / Sequoia Union HSD
San Mateo · 3,500+ students · K-12
Las Lomitas K-8 feeding Menlo-Atherton or private schools (Menlo, Sacred Heart). The estate-privacy end of the Peninsula.
View district →03How to Read
Three Filters.
A district decision is rarely a single-ranking decision. Address, feeder path, budget, and the child's academic profile all need to be read together.
Verify the feeder path
The home address — not parental choice — typically determines twelve years of schooling. Confirm the elementary, middle, and high school assigned to a specific address before writing an offer; lines do not always follow city or even neighborhood boundaries.
Compare prices to budget
Different attendance areas inside the same district can vary by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Knowing the median range for each district — and each feeder — makes the trade-off between school ambition and housing budget concrete instead of abstract.
Read past the score
The composite rating is a starting point, not a verdict. AP load, STEM resources, arts and athletics depth, and culture (collaborative vs. competitive) matter as much as the headline number — and they vary widely between schools that share the same rating tier.
04MK Group
School fit meets home search.
MK Group works the six core Bay Area districts day to day — feeder verification, neighborhood texture, and current market read for every street.