We're Buying in Woodside or Portola Valley — Where Do the Kids Go to High School After K-8? Does Either Town Have Its Own High School?

Direct answer

Neither town runs its own public high school. Woodside Elementary School District (401 students enrolled in 2025-26) and Portola Valley School District (513) both end at grade 8. Grades 9-12 are assigned by home address within Sequoia Union High School District, and most addresses feed Woodside High (1,694 enrolled). A small number of Portola Valley addresses belong to Palo Alto Unified instead — so every address has to be checked individually.

Who this article is for

• Families touring estates or hillside homes in Woodside or Portola Valley with a preschool or elementary-age child, who want the full K-12 path mapped before committing to an address
• Local families whose child is already in grades 6-8 at Woodside Elementary or Corte Madera and who are starting to plan for ninth grade
• Buyers looking at a listing that reads Woodside (94062) or Portola Valley (94028), where the house sits near the town line or in an unincorporated pocket and the district has to be pinned down
• Buyers moving west from Palo Alto or Los Altos toward the larger hillside parcels, who are used to one city mapping to one school district
• Cross-border and out-of-state families planning to tour and decide in a single trip, who want the assignment rules settled before they land

Three things that actually decide this

"How good is the Woodside school district?" is not a question with an answer, because the public path in both towns is built from two pieces: a town-level K-8 district first, then a high school district that serves nine communities. Broken into the three questions below, it becomes clear which piece a given address actually belongs to.

One: the K-8 district is not the high school district

Woodside Elementary School District is registered with the California Department of Education (CDE) as an elementary school district, and it is a single-school district: one campus, Woodside Elementary, serving K-8, with 401 students enrolled districtwide in 2025-26. Portola Valley School District carries the same registration, enrolled 513 students in 2025-26, and runs two schools — Ormondale for K-3 and Corte Madera for 4-8. PVSD describes its service area as the communities of Portola Valley and Woodside. In other words, part of the Town of Woodside sends its K-8 students to PVSD, not WESD.

Both districts end at eighth grade. Grades 9-12 belong to Sequoia Union High School District (SUHSD), registered with CDE as a high school district, with 9,321 students enrolled in 2025-26. That is the CDE figure, and it includes in-district charter and alternative programs, 803 of them in charter schools; the district's own profile describes itself as serving nearly 9,000 students, so the two numbers are measured differently. SUHSD serves nine communities — Atherton, Belmont, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Portola Valley, Redwood City, Redwood Shores, San Carlos, and Woodside — through four comprehensive high schools: Carlmont, Menlo-Atherton, Sequoia, and Woodside. It also runs East Palo Alto Academy, Redwood continuation high school, an adult school, and a Middle College program with Cañada College.

Here the picture differs from Hillsborough. Woodside High is listed in the CDE directory at 199 Churchill Ave., Woodside 94062, with 1,694 students enrolled in 2025-26, and the campus does sit on a Woodside address (some third-party sources list the same address as Redwood City; the campus is near the line between the two). But it belongs to SUHSD and answers to the SUHSD board. It has no reporting relationship with the Town of Woodside or with Woodside Elementary School District. So the precise answer to "does Woodside have its own high school?" is this: there is a public high school that carries the town's name, but it is neither the town's school nor an extension of the K-8 district. Portola Valley has no public high school inside town limits. Woodside Priory, a private school serving grades 6-12, is located inside Portola Valley at 302 Portola Rd.

Two: which high school is set by the attendance boundary for your address

SUHSD's enrollment page is direct about it. Once registration is complete, your student will be assigned to a high school based on your home address. The district's lookup tool is Boundary Search, linked from the Enrollment page on the SUHSD site.

Local community sources agree that students from both WESD and PVSD generally feed Woodside High on the public side, not Menlo-Atherton. Treat that as the typical case, not a street-by-street confirmation from the district. PVSD's own public materials say roughly half its graduates continue into SUHSD and the other half go on to independent high schools around the region, without naming a specific public campus. The answer that counts is the one Boundary Search returns for the exact street address in front of you.

The exceptions cluster where a listing carries one of these town names but the house does not belong to either town's K-8 district. Three have public documentation:

• The PAUSD corner of Portola Valley. Palo Alto Unified's new-student enrollment page states: Some areas of Los Altos Hills and Portola Valley are within PAUSD boundaries. PAUSD is a unified K-12 district, so these addresses stay in PAUSD from elementary through high school and never enter SUHSD. PAUSD does not publish a written list of the affected streets; the check is done address by address in PAUSD's School Finder.
• Ladera, on the 94028 ZIP code. Ladera is an unincorporated community next to Portola Valley. It is not part of the Town of Portola Valley, and its K-8 students belong to Las Lomitas Elementary School District. We covered city limits and district questions for unincorporated addresses separately in The Listing Says Menlo Park or Portola Valley, But the House Isn't Inside City Limits, so we won't repeat that here.
• Kings Mountain, on the 94062 ZIP code. Kings Mountain runs along Skyline Blvd outside Woodside town limits as an unincorporated community. Kings Mountain Elementary, on the ridge, belongs administratively to Cabrillo Unified School District, headquartered in Half Moon Bay — not to WESD.

Beyond these, the K-8 districts that feed SUHSD also include Belmont-Redwood Shores, Las Lomitas, Menlo Park City, Ravenswood, Redwood City, and San Carlos, and unincorporated parcels near the town lines can land in any of them. Several districts running in parallel under one ZIP code is normal on the Peninsula's western hills. We don't list specific streets here because no district publishes a written boundary list, and any secondhand street roster can already be out of date.

Three: when the district changes, how transfers work, and what the TIDE closure means

Finishing eighth grade is not a promotion. It is a change of district, with fresh registration. For incoming ninth graders, SUHSD's sequence runs like this: complete Online Registration before Feb. 1, attend the school's transition information session in spring, then choose courses and confirm the school placement. Proof of residence comes in three groups: one valid form of ID; one address document (a property tax bill, lease, or grant deed); and two recent supporting documents (utility bills, tax returns, voter registration, pay stubs, and similar). Families who have just closed and have not yet received a property tax bill should have the grant deed or another accepted document ready.

For a school other than the one tied to the address, SUHSD's route is Open Enrollment Transfers, and it is open to incoming ninth graders only. The district states that applications open each Oct. 15 and close Feb. 1 at 4 p.m.; once each school sets its enrollment targets and confirms available seats, placements are made by random lottery. Late applications do not go onto a waitlist, and results are final after the deadline. Students already enrolled who want to change schools contact their current school directly. Moving to a district outside SUHSD (PAUSD, for example) runs on a separate set of interdistrict transfer rules, which we explain in We Live in Another Bay Area City — Can We Apply for an Interdistrict Transfer So Our Child Can Attend School in Palo Alto or Los Altos?

Last is the change arriving with the 2026-27 school year. On Feb. 4, 2026, the SUHSD board voted to close TIDE Academy, a small high school in Menlo Park, effective June 30, 2026. The district's TIDE information page laid out a plan to move TIDE's academic programs — including its dual-enrollment courses and CTE career pathways — into Woodside High beginning in 2026-27. TIDE's 124 students in grades 10-12 were redistributed as follows: Menlo-Atherton 61, Sequoia 28, Woodside 28, East Palo Alto Academy 3, Redwood 3, Carlmont 1; students who made no selection returned to their address-assigned school. For families of incoming ninth graders, two things follow. TIDE no longer appears as an option on the open enrollment page, which now lists East Palo Alto Academy or a school other than the address-assigned one. And while the district planned to fold TIDE's dual-enrollment and CTE pathways into Woodside High, The Almanac reported on Aug. 28, 2026 that some courses were not offered as originally planned in the first year. The report noted that 26 former TIDE students actually transferred to Woodside, and that at least one course in the computer science pathway the district had committed to keeping was not offered; the district acknowledged that continuing the TIDE program at Woodside exactly as it had run was not feasible. Which courses actually run is set by Woodside High's master schedule for that school year.

The structure and the market on one page

The core numbers first. Woodside Elementary School District enrolled 401 students in 2025-26 and Portola Valley School District enrolled 513, and both end at grade 8. Grades 9-12 in both towns belong to Sequoia Union High School District, with 9,321 students enrolled districtwide (CDE basis, including in-district charters); of those, 1,694 attend Woodside High, which is listed at a Woodside address.

What to take from this: the first column decides the outcome, not the town name on the listing. Two addresses that both read Portola Valley can lead to PVSD and then SUHSD, or to PAUSD from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Two addresses that both read Woodside can sit in WESD, in PVSD, or across the ridge in Cabrillo Unified. "Most feed Woodside High" is a strong probability, not a result. Each street address only counts once it has been run through the official tools.

Now the market side. The core numbers first: in Q2 2026, Woodside recorded 31 single-family closings at a $4,500,000 median sale price, 74.2% all-cash, and 21 median days on market. Portola Valley recorded 21 closings at a $3,600,000 median, 23.8% all-cash, and 18 median days on market.

What to take from this: close to three of every four Woodside closings that quarter were all-cash, and the median sale-to-original-list ratio was 97.3%. Deals like these tend to move from tour to diligence to offer in one continuous run, with no loan-approval period to finish the research along the way. The district check has to be done before the offer, not during escrow. A median only marks the middle of the range. Large-parcel estates in both towns span a very wide price band, and the medians in this table do not represent the price of any single property type.

What MK Group sees in the field

One archived Woodside example in the MK Group case library (case-004) involves a family that Marie Wang (DRE# 02110980) and Kevin Mo (DRE# 02127623) worked with: a budget of roughly $35 million, every family member a rider. They would look only in Woodside — stables, an arena, land with room to ride — and turned down Atherton outright as an alternative. For that family, the decision started with the land, not the schools. But once children reach school age, district assignment becomes a diligence item on the same level as parcel boundaries and fire-safety requirements.

At MK Group we treat school assignment diligence as a required pre-offer step. One real case comes from Atherton Oaks (case-014). The house the client wanted carried an Atherton 94027 address, but Atherton spans three K-8 districts, with assignment set street by street. We checked the attendance area by exact address before writing the offer and found the house sat on the far side of the boundary the client had assumed. The client redirected to a comparable home on the other side of that line; comparable homes on the two sides were trading about $1.5 million apart. That gap is invisible on the day of purchase. It shows up years later, in the list price at resale. We wrote up Atherton's three-district structure separately in Buying in Atherton or Menlo Park — Which School District Do Your Kids Actually Land In?

Woodside and Portola Valley work differently from Atherton, but the step is the same: take the exact street address to each district's official tool, and run K-8 and 9-12 as two separate lookups.

Common mistakes

Mistake one: "The town has a school district, so it has its own high school"

It does not. Woodside Elementary School District and Portola Valley School District are both registered with CDE as elementary school districts, ending at grade 8. Grades 9-12 belong to Sequoia Union High School District, run by a different board, with its own registration process and its own deadlines. Woodside High may carry a Woodside address, but it is an SUHSD school, not an extension of the town or its K-8 district.

Mistake two: "Portola Valley students all go to Menlo-Atherton"

Local community sources agree that PVSD and WESD students generally feed Woodside High on the public side, not M-A; it is most Atherton and Menlo Park addresses that feed M-A. That is still a description of the typical case, not a guarantee. PAUSD confirms officially that parts of Portola Valley fall inside its boundaries, and those addresses stay in PAUSD from elementary through high school. The only reliable answer comes from running the exact address through SUHSD Boundary Search and PAUSD School Finder.

Mistake three: "If the address says Woodside or Portola Valley, the K-8 district must be the town's"

Not necessarily. PVSD itself covers part of the Town of Woodside; Ladera, on the 94028 ZIP code, belongs to Las Lomitas; and Kings Mountain Elementary, on the 94062 ZIP code, belongs to Cabrillo Unified. ZIP codes are drawn by the postal system. District boundaries are a separate set of lines, and the two routinely fail to match.

Mistake four: "If we want a different school for ninth grade, we can apply once the year starts"

SUHSD open enrollment is open to incoming ninth graders only. The window opens each Oct. 15 and closes Feb. 1 at 4 p.m.; late applications do not go onto a waitlist, and results are final after the deadline. Seats go by lottery when they exist, not by order of application. Students already enrolled who want to switch schools contact their school directly. By the fall of eighth grade, the window is already open.

Mistake five: "TIDE has closed, but its program is still available near Menlo Park"

TIDE Academy closed on June 30, 2026, and SUHSD currently operates no high school campus inside Menlo Park city limits. The district planned to move TIDE's dual-enrollment courses and CTE pathways into Woodside High; The Almanac reported on Aug. 28, 2026 that some courses were not offered as originally planned in the first year. For families in Woodside and Portola Valley, don't assume the former TIDE curriculum is running in full at the address-assigned school. Confirm course by course with Woodside High before course selection.

Next steps

1. Once you have an exact street address, first confirm which K-8 district it belongs to (WESD, PVSD, Las Lomitas, or another), then run SUHSD Boundary Search for the grades 9-12 assignment. For a Portola Valley address, also run it through PAUSD School Finder. Save a screenshot or PDF of every lookup.
2. Call or email the relevant K-8 district office and SUHSD directly to confirm the address's assignment and the current year's registration deadline. Don't treat the listing description or a map app's school label as the assignment.
3. If your child is approaching ninth grade, put SUHSD Online Registration (before Feb. 1), the three groups of residency documents, and the open enrollment window (Oct. 15 to Feb. 1) on a single calendar. How the closing date lines up with the enrollment date is a separate set of rules worth checking early.
4. If the former TIDE dual-enrollment or CTE courses matter to you, confirm directly with Woodside High how those courses are offered from 2026-27 onward and what the enrollment requirements are.
5. Write every result above into a written diligence checklist and finish it before the offer. In Q2 2026, 74.2% of Woodside closings were all-cash — at this tier, the time for diligence does not come after the offer.