Public schools · Lake Washington School District · Open in explorer ↗

Samantha Smith Elementary

Lake Washington School District · Elementary · grades K-5 · 23305 NE 14th St, Sammamish, WA 98074-4441

Location

23305 NE 14th St, Sammamish, WA 98074-4441

Academic snapshot

Meeting standard, latest year
87.7%
SBAC ELA+Math combined, 2024-25
Meeting standard, 3-year
87.6%
#13 of 558 elementary schools region-wide · #2 of 32 in this district
Exceeding standard, latest year
65.9%
SBAC Level 4, the top score band
Exceeding standard, 3-year
68.1%
#16 of 558 elementary schools region-wide · #3 of 32 in this district
3-year trend

Who attends

Students from low-income homes
3.3%
English language learners
12.7%
Highly Capable program
26.1%
Enrollment
545
Kids per typical block
Density band: unknown

Teachers

Teachers (latest)
41
Avg years experience
12.9
MA-degree share
75.6%
3-year experience trend

Avg years and MA-degree share are direct OSPI publications; the 3-year trend is our derivation. From data.wa.gov/yp28-ks6d.

School pathway

Which schools connect to this one by attendance area. Your address decides the assignment, so confirm with the district before relying on it. See the full elementary to high-school pathways.

Highly Capable / gifted pathway

Curated from district Highly Capable program pages, with observed-at dates and confidence labels.

Research dossier

Samantha Smith Elementary

Lake Washington School District · grades K–5 · 545 students · attendance-area school in Sammamish and Full-Time Quest host campus

The verdict

At Smith, the peer group is the product and the building is the price. This is where the Lake Washington School District (LWSD) concentrates the Eastlake area's most accelerated elementary students. A quarter of the school is identified highly capable, and self-contained Quest cohorts bus in from four neighboring boundaries. The trophy record reads like a middle school's: a state chess team title, a national top-10% Math Olympiad honor roll, and a fifth grader ranked third in the country on Math Kangaroo. If your child's social currency is math, chess, or robotics, there may be no deeper elementary peer pool in the district.

The price comes in two forms. Physically, Smith occupies a 1988 California-style open-concept campus where kids walk outdoors between building pods, including from the portables to the restrooms, in Pacific Northwest weather. Its rebuild is the furthest out of the district's elementary projects, targeted for 2031. Operationally, the celebrated club ecosystem, run by the Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA), depends on compulsory parent labor: no volunteer in the room means no club session, and volunteering parents get priority registration. Dual-working families should price that in before assuming their kid gets a seat.

Researched 2026-06-10. Citations and claim ledger included in the full dossier.

That is the free excerpt. The full dossier is the rest of the file: how these outcomes hold up in context, how deep the advanced-peer group actually runs, how families get in (and who doesn't), culture signals from handbooks and climate surveys, logistics, neighborhood context, the open questions to ask on your tour, and every citation, so you can check our work. Unlock it for $9, or get a $29 Research Pass with 3 dossiers included.

More schools in Lake Washington School District

Public schools A–Z · Compare in the explorer

Sources

Researching schools around here?

Get an email when new dossiers or datasets are published for this area, a few times a season, nothing else.