If you live in Venice, Mar Vista, or Marina del Rey and you've got a kid heading to TK or kinder, Coeur d'Alene Avenue Elementary ("CDA" to the locals) probably keeps coming up. We took the tour. Here's the honest read.

This is the kind of school where families walk or bike together in the morning, end up at the same Saturday soccer game, and then bump into each other again at the beach. A real neighborhood school, the way LA used to have. And after a rocky few years, it's having a moment.

The quick stats

A few years back, CDA was struggling. If you've gone down the GreatSchools reviews rabbit hole, you've seen the rough ones - "major crisis," "chaotic," and "14 staff members quit in one year." Enrollment dipped. Families peeled off to other schools. It was not great.

Then Ms. Fang showed up.

She's a 27 year LAUSD veteran who's done basically every job in a school building - pre-K to 5th grade teacher, instructional coach, intervention coordinator, assistant principal, now principal. CDA is the only school she applied to lead. "It just checks all the boxes for me," she told our tour group. "I'm a mom first and foremost, so a lot of times I make my decisions based on a parent's perspective."

That parent first lens is showing up in the numbers.

Ms. Fang openly walks tour parents through the California School Dashboard (the public state report card most parents have never heard of - we had to look it up).

For CDA in the most recent year:

She also showed us the LAUSD School Experience Survey results - the annual survey staff, parents, and students all take. Her first year: 100% teacher satisfaction. Overall school rating jumped from a 6/10 to a 10/10 in a single year.

When the teachers don't want to leave, the kids notice. That was the whole point of her sharing it.

Since Ms. Fang arrived, the campus has had quite the glow-up:

CDA is officially the Coeur d'Alene Avenue School for Advanced Studies. It's one of several SAS elementary campuses in the LAUSD West region - locally, Mar Vista, Beethoven, and Playa del Rey also carry the SAS designation, and Overland, Palms, Fairburn, Richland, Hancock Park, 3rd St., Rosewood, and Wilton Place round out the West list. SAS schools are designed to serve gifted learners with differentiated, deeper instruction, even when kids aren't formally GATE-identified yet.

CDA has a high percentage of GATE students, and the staff is genuinely helpful at getting kids identified, including kids who don't ace the OLSAT on test day. If you're new to all this, here's our GATE 101 guide to OLSAT, magnet points, and how identification actually works.

Worth knowing for the SAS designation: enrollment isn't just neighborhood. SAS schools accept applications from outside the boundary too, which is part of why we keep meeting Marina del Rey and Mar Vista families on CDA's campus.

CDA is small, about 280 kids total, with 2 TK classes this year (maybe 3 next year). Ms. Fang likes the size and isn't trying to balloon it.

The demographic mix per the most recent SARC report:

A subgroup you'll notice in person: a sizable community of European, Russian, and Ukrainian families, many of whom landed on the Westside in recent years. (Marina del Rey is one of LA's known Russian-speaking enclaves, and Ukrainian families have settled across Playa Vista, MDR, and Venice.) It gives CDA a quietly international feel that surprises a lot of first time visitors.

We met Meg, the president of FOCDA (Friends of Coeur d'Alene), CDA's booster club.

A few things stood out:

You feel it walking around. Parents are pulling weeds in the garden, prepping balloon arches for the auction, doing morning car line in orange vests. It's a working PTA culture, not a Pinterest one.

This is the thing that hit us hardest on the tour: CDA feels like an old school neighborhood school.

Kids walk or bike. Families are on the same little league and soccer teams. Same beach on weekends. Parents have group texts that turn into actual friendships. The dads' valet crew has its own group chat (Meg is, by her own admission, trying to get into it 😂).

Ms. Fang's mission statement - "safe, inclusive, and academically challenging where every student can thrive" - sounds like every other school brochure until you watch her introduce herself to a new kindergartner who wanders into the room mid tour, and the kid clearly already knows her.

The campus itself is genuinely beautiful. Outdoor learning nooks. The new garden. Shade sails. A play yard divided into quiet play vs. active play. Murals. You can tell the parents who are involved love it.

CDA does small group tours roughly weekly during enrollment season (recent ones have been ~8:40–9 AM). You can see upcoming tour dates on the
school's calendar or call the office at (310) 821-7813. The school is a closed campus during the day, but morning tours are walk in friendly.

Notice the recess. Adults in orange vests, engaged, circulating. Ms. Fang has thoughts on schools where you "drive by at recess and can't see the adults."

What's happening on that campus right now…new principal, new garden, new STEM, new teams, active booster club, dashboard going blue across the board, and a teacher group that doesn't want to leave - is one of the more interesting public school stories on the Westside.

If you've been writing off your neighborhood school because of something you read on Great Schools, it might be worth a second look. Tour it. Talk to Meg. Meet Ms. Fang. Walk the garden. You'll probably know within 20 minutes if it's your people.