School Profile

Marguerita Elementary School is one of nineteen schools in the Alhambra Unified School District of Los Angeles County. The school is named after the street, which was named for Marguerita Shorb, daughter of James De Barth Shorb and granddaughter of Benjamin Wilson, an early Alhambra landowner and Mayor of Los Angeles. The school is located at 1603 South Marguerita Avenue in the city of Alhambra. It first opened in 1930, with 303 pupils in kindergarten through grade 6.

Today, Marguerita serves about 850 students from Transitional Kindergarten through Grade 8, which includes 250 students who are enrolled in our Dual Immersion Mandarin program. The school is committed to creating a collaborative environment and to provide rigorous educational opportunities in areas of reading, writing, math, science, and social studies to all students.

At Marguerita School, all students, staff, parents, and community continue to strive forward with the new Common Core Standards to ensure all students are Career and College ready and to make Marguerita School a safe and successful place to learn and grow. The school embraces and functions as a Professional Learning Community of teachers (PLC), adjusts schedules and instructional strategies to meet the needs of each and every individual student. In addition to the variety of professional development conducted by the Alhambra Unified School District for all teachers by grade levels, the school itself also provides site-level professional development based on best practices and current research to address the Common Core Standards to meet the learning, thinking, and conceptual understanding of subject matter for all students.

Marguerita School’s pyramid of intervention/instruction for reading consists of three tiers of instruction, supported by all staff. Tier I, core reading, supports all students through Readers Workshop. Tier II reading intervention is provided by any of the following staff: Intervention Specialists, Intervention Aides, or RSP teacher. At Marguerita School, the research-based program for Tier II reading intervention is Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI). The INSIDE program is currently used by the Special Day Classes at Marguerita School. Instruction under this three-tiered strategic pyramid of intervention for reading is provided by highly trained and credentialed teachers.  

The highly qualified intervention team also serves students in a math push-in intervention model. Additionally each year, the school also seeks students from the high schools in the district to help tutor students at least once a week in math.

In grades K-8, English Learner (EL) students are clustered according to their English Proficiency levels during Designated ELD instruction. Classroom teachers in an ELD level teaming model address English Learners during Designated ELD time slots in Language Arts. Throughout the entire school day, English Language Development is integrated into all curriculum subject areas for all students.