Summary:
The four elementary schools in Berkeley School District 87 serve prekindergarten through grade 5: Jefferson Primary School and Whittier Primary School serve younger students, while Sunnyside Intermediate School and J W Riley Intermediate School serve grades 3–5. Together, the schools enroll 1,412 students. Test results are available only for Sunnyside and Riley, so the academic comparison covers those two schools. The most important finding is that Riley has stronger overall results than Sunnyside, but both schools’ all-grades proficiency rates remain below state results.
J W Riley stands out among the tested schools: in 2025–2026, it had 43% proficiency in ELA and 35% in math, compared with 34% and 26% at Sunnyside—advantages of 9 points in each subject. Riley was also ahead in fifth-grade science, 26% to 24%. Still, both schools trailed the state in all-grades ELA and math: Riley by 14 and 5 points, and Sunnyside by 23 and 14 points. The grade-level picture has an exception: Riley leads in grade 3, while Sunnyside leads in grade 4 by 4 points in both ELA and math. SchoolDigger’s 2025–2026 rankings also place Riley higher, at the 25th percentile versus Sunnyside’s 11th.
Scores rose at both schools from 2024–2025 to 2025–2026: Sunnyside gained 5 points in ELA and 2 in math, while Riley gained 7 in ELA and 1 in math. Yet SchoolDigger’s percentile rankings fell over the longer span shown: Sunnyside went from the 16th to the 11th percentile, and Riley from the 31st to the 25th. For context, in 2024–2025, 80% of Sunnyside students and 85% of Riley students were free/reduced lunch eligible; Riley’s student-teacher ratio was 9.9, compared with Sunnyside’s 10.5. These figures describe the schools but do not explain their score differences.
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