Pleasant Hill Schools
One district covers the whole town, so there is nothing to check. The schools themselves are another matter — the range here is wider than anywhere else in the valley.
Pleasant Hill is the easiest town in this series to answer the first question about. Every home in it is in Mount Diablo Unified.
Published August 25, 2026
A 1 and a 9, two and a half miles apart
Fair Oaks Elementary rates 1/10. Sequoia Elementary rates 9/10. They are about 2.5 miles apart, in the same town, in the same district, with the same postcode.
On the state tests it is 21.05% against 68.47% in English, and 14.29% against 69.04% in maths. Nearly the whole of the ten point scale, and most of the range of outcomes in the county, inside one town you can drive across in ten minutes.
The gap runs the whole way through
The difference is not one school. It runs the length of both pipelines — elementary, middle and high.
The Concord edge of town
Fair Oaks 1/10 → Oak Grove 4/10 → Ygnacio Valley 3/10
Central Pleasant Hill
Strandwood 7/10 → Pleasant Hill 9/10 → College Park 8/10
That is thirteen years, and it does not appear on any single school's page.
These are outcome figures, not a measure of teaching. Schools at the low end of a district serve different families from those at the high end, and a proficiency rate reflects both at once. An address commits a family to the chain either way.
Which elementary leads where
Only two elementaries split, and only one of those changes the high school. Everything else runs straight through to College Park.
Central Pleasant Hill
Pleasant Hill and Strandwood → Pleasant Hill Middle → College Park High
North and west
Valhalla, and Hidden Valley over the Martinez line → Valley View Middle → College Park High
Gregory Gardens
Gregory Gardens → Pleasant Hill or Valley View Middle → College Park High
The Concord edge
Fair Oaks → Oak Grove or Pleasant Hill Middle → Ygnacio Valley High
- Gregory Gardens Elementary — Pleasant Hill Middle or Valley View Middle — but both go on to College Park, so the high school is not in doubt.
- Fair Oaks Elementary — Oak Grove Middle or Pleasant Hill Middle, and Ygnacio Valley High rather than College Park. The one address in town where the whole chain is different.
Pleasant Hill schools
| School | Grades | Rating | English | Math |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fair Oaks Elementary2400 Lisa LnThe lowest rated and lowest scoring school in Pleasant Hill by a wide margin, and most of its attendance area is actually in Concord. Splits between Oak Grove Middle and Pleasant Hill Middle. | K-5 | 1/10 | 21.05% | 14.29% |
| Gregory Gardens Elementary1 Corritone CtDown about six points in English last year, the sharpest fall in town. Splits between Pleasant Hill Middle and Valley View Middle, though both end at College Park. | K-5 | 6/10 | 40.96% | 38.03% |
| Pleasant Hill Elementary2097 Oak Park BlvdRated the same as Gregory Gardens on scores about sixteen points higher. Worth reading alongside the note on ratings below. | K-5 | 6/10 | 56.59% | 57.1% |
| Valhalla Elementary530 Kiki DrGrew about a quarter in six years while the district barely moved. Also serves part of Martinez. | K-5 | 8/10 | 63.41% | 57.01% |
| Strandwood Elementary416 Gladys DrEnglish rose while maths fell about six points, which is unusual enough to be worth a question at a school tour. | K-5 | 7/10 | 64.29% | 54.89% |
| Sequoia Elementary277 Boyd RdThe strongest school in town in both subjects. Nobody is zoned here: it is a district-wide school of choice, and the application window opens months before the ordinary one. | K-5 | 9/10 | 68.47% | 69.04% |
| Valley View Middle School181 Viking DrUp more than seven points in English last year. Also serves part of Martinez. | 6-8 | 8/10 | 53.18% | 45.09% |
| Sequoia Middle School265 Boyd RdThe other district-wide school of choice, on the same street as Sequoia Elementary. No attendance zone, so the whole sixth grade arrives by application. | 6-8 | 7/10 | 55.33% | 46.23% |
| Pleasant Hill Middle School1 Santa Barbara RdThe highest rated school in Pleasant Hill, and up more than nine points in English last year. Its maths figure is still under half. | 6-8 | 9/10 | 58.85% | 46.64% |
| College Park High School201 Viking DrThe only comprehensive high school in Pleasant Hill, and it also takes south Martinez, Pacheco and small parts of Lafayette, Concord and Walnut Creek. Closed to transfers from outside the district. | 9-12 | 8/10 | 61.02% | 43.88% |
Across Mount Diablo Unified, 48.11% of students met the state English standard and 38.7% met the maths one in 2024-25. Most of the schools above are ahead of that on both. High school figures are eleventh graders only.
The rating is not the score, and here you can see it
Two schools in this table rate exactly the same and are nowhere near each other on the tests.
- Pleasant Hill Elementary rates 6/10 with 56.59% in English.
- Gregory Gardens rates the same 6/10 with 40.96% — about sixteen points lower.
The rating folds in how much children improve year to year and how different groups of them do, not just the test result, so two schools can land on the same number from very different places. Neither figure is wrong. They answer different questions, and the rating is the one that answers less about where a class actually is.
The same caution runs the other way at the top. Pleasant Hill Middle is the highest rated school in town at 9/10, and fewer than half its students met the maths standard — 46.64%. A 9 out of 10 does not mean most children are on grade level in maths.
Two schools you apply to, on a calendar nobody tells you about
Sequoia Elementary and Sequoia Middle sit on the same street and neither has an attendance zone. Living next door earns you nothing. Every seat comes from an application, and they are two of Mount Diablo's three district-wide schools of choice. Any address in Mount Diablo Unified can apply, whichever town it is in — Concord, Pleasant Hill, Clayton, Bay Point, and the parts of Walnut Creek and Martinez the district covers.
Monte Gardens Elementary (K-5)
3841 Larkspur Dr, Concord · 562 students
A neighbourhood school and a district-wide one at the same time. Inside its boundary you are simply assigned, no application. From anywhere else in the district you apply. An International Baccalaureate school since June 2025.
Sequoia Elementary (K-5)
277 Boyd Rd, Pleasant Hill · 594 students
No attendance zone at all, so every seat comes from an application. Also an International Baccalaureate school. The district does not publish any odds for the kindergarten lottery.
Sequoia Middle School (6-8)
265 Boyd Rd, Pleasant Hill · 882 students
Runs AVID across the whole school, plus STEAM electives. Nobody is zoned here, so the whole sixth grade arrives by lottery.
The bit that catches people
- Applications for the schools of choice run 10 October to 10 November, for the following September.
- Ordinary new-kindergarten registration runs 10 February to 10 March — three months later.
- A public lottery in December, with eight priority tiers, and results before the end of that month.
- So a family that moves here over the summer has already missed it, without ever being told it existed.
College Park, Sequoia Elementary and Sequoia Middle are all closed to transfers from outside Mount Diablo. Inside the district you can apply to any of them.
The other schools on Santa Barbara Road
Four schools share 1 Santa Barbara Road. It was Pleasant Hill High School from 1953 to 1980. College Park was built in 1960 to take the overflow, and outlasted it.
| School | Grades | Rating | English | Math |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prospect High School1 Santa Barbara RdContinuation high school. Its test results come from around a dozen students, so they are not comparable with any other school on this page and are left off deliberately. | 9-12 | 4/10 | – | – |
| Horizons School1 Santa Barbara RdIndependent study, kindergarten through twelfth grade. | K-12 | 8/10 | 46.3% | 39.42% |
Prospect is the continuation high school and Horizons is independent study. Their intake is nothing like a neighbourhood school's, so comparing their scores with the table above would not tell you anything. Prospect's test results come from around a dozen students and are left off this page for that reason.
This district is not shrinking
Worth saying plainly, because falling rolls and school closures are the story in a lot of districts around here and they are not the story in this one. Mount Diablo Unified peaked at 32,005 students in 2015-16 and fell to 29,789 by 2021-22. It has gone up every year since, 4 in a row, and now sits at 30,330.
Last year it grew 0.55% while California as a whole fell 1.3%. The district puts the growth down to transitional kindergarten and budgets for it to flatten out, so this is not a boom. But there is no closure list here, no boundary review, and no school in Pleasant Hill has been proposed for either.
The district does spend more than it takes in, and says it will not meet its own reserve target in 2027-28 without cuts. Its budget certifications have stayed positive throughout, and there were no layoffs in 2025 or 2026.
Names that put a school in the wrong town
There is no district to check here, which is rare. But the names around Pleasant Hill are unusually misleading, and these catch people constantly.
- Acalanes High School's address is 1200 Pleasant Hill Road, and the Acalanes district office is at 1212 Pleasant Hill Road. Both are in Lafayette. Neither serves a single Pleasant Hill address.
- Hidden Valley Elementary has a Martinez address but sits in Pleasant Hill's trustee area and feeds Valley View Middle and College Park, the same as a Pleasant Hill school.
- Fair Oaks Elementary is in Pleasant Hill, but most of the children it teaches live in Concord, and they go on to Ygnacio Valley High rather than College Park.
- Reliez Valley, just south, splits across three districts — but none of it is inside Pleasant Hill, and no address on Reliez Valley Road carries a Pleasant Hill postcode.
If you are near the Concord line, check anyway. Mount Diablo Unified's school locator takes a street address and gives all three schools. The district's own note on it is that it is a guideline rather than a binding assignment, so ring them if it matters: .
There is no general-education school bus for Pleasant Hill. Mount Diablo runs home-to-school routes in two places and neither is here: Bay Point, for Mt. Diablo and Olympic High, and the former Glenbrook area of Concord, for El Dorado Middle. You will still see yellow buses in town. The district runs 111 of them, carrying about 1,591 special education students to 49 sites every day, and about 1,500 field trips a year. None of it is a route a Pleasant Hill family can put a child on to get to school. For that, older children ride County Connection free with a Pass2Class. Pleasant Hill's schools are not on one of the dedicated 600-series school routes — those run elsewhere in the district — so check the individual school's route map for the regular local route that serves it.
If the district school isn't right
Alternatives to your public school district covers the private and charter options around here, what they cost where that is published, and who can actually get in.
The two schools of choice above are worth trying first, though. They are free, they are inside the district you are already in, and one of them is the strongest school in town.
About this page
The numbers come from the district, the state test results, and federal enrollment data. I last checked them on August 25, 2026.
Everything here is from a public source — school and district websites and their own boundary tools, the state test results, and federal enrollment data. None of it is private or insider information, and none of it is my own estimate.
Think something here is wrong? Please tell me at report@mountdiablofamilies.com and I will fix it. I would far rather hear about it than leave another parent working off a bad number.
I am not ranking these schools. Which one is right depends on your kid.
This is an independent guide. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any school district. Where a district’s logo appears, it is there to identify the district the page is about.