Every elementary school in Greenville County, South Carolina — all 53 district schools plus charter, private and Montessori — filtered, listed, or compared side by side. One “Selector Score” with its evidence shown, private tuition before and after the state voucher, and drive times from your home address during the morning rush hour. We gather the details a school tour usually covers — lunch prices, after-school care and what it costs, gifted programs, arts and clubs — so the tour itself can be about getting a feel for a place you've only read about. The School Selector is free, independent, and not affiliated with any school or district. Made by parents in the community trying to make the best choices for their little ones.
Drive time is the number most families end up deciding on — and it's the one number no school website can tell you. Type in the address you'll be driving from, and every school below is re-routed from your door, leaving at 7:45 AM on the next weekday, which is when school drop-off actually happens.
You don't have to read this page top to bottom. This is the short version of what to do with it.
Your address is automatically entitled to one public elementary school. Find it in the district's free tool, then find that school in the list below. It is your baseline — everything else is a trade against it.
Every drive time on the page is re-measured from your door. Do this before you filter — it changes the ranking, the filters and the comparison table.
Set a drive time you'd actually accept and a tuition you'd actually pay. Check the programs that matter. What's left is your shortlist — usually five to ten schools, not all sixty-nine.
Add up to three schools to the tray at the bottom and compare them side by side. Print the result, then phone each school to ask about tour days and times, and get on the list if there is one. Confirm tuition and deadlines while you have them on the phone — details change, and this page is a starting point, not a verified source.
Dates below are for a child starting kindergarten in August 2027 — the year currently open for applications. The windows are short, and two of them are the ones families miss: school-choice lottery forms are picked up in person in November and are not available online, and the state voucher is first-served. Miss either and you wait a full year.
Everything below assumes you know nothing about the system — whether you're moving in from another state or you've lived here for years and simply never had a child in school yet. The rating scale, the voucher, the lotteries, the gifted route, and the one law every parent in this state should know about. Open whichever section you need.
A child must turn 5 on or before September 1 to start kindergarten that fall. Kindergarten has been compulsory in South Carolina since 2023, and full-day kindergarten is the standard in Greenville County — there is no half-day option to choose between.
If your child's birthday falls close to the cutoff, South Carolina does allow "redshirting" — holding a child back a year — through a parental waiver signed off by the school. It is a real option, not a loophole, and it is worth a conversation with the school rather than a decision made alone.
Gather these before the spring registration window. Every one of them is required, and the immunization record is the only one that needs an appointment.
Registration is online through Parent Backpack → "Enroll a Student." Paper forms are available at every school if you would rather do it in person, and school offices will help you through it.
Every drive figure on this page is routed over real roads — none of them are straight-line distance, and none are typed in by hand. There are two sources, and they are never mixed silently.
Until you give the tool an address, every school shows a time routed from central Greenville County — the county seat, a public landmark chosen because it sits roughly in the middle of the schools on this page. It is marked est. everywhere it appears, and it is free-flow: roads with no traffic on them. Treat it as a rough floor. It is not measured from your house and it will be wrong for you, in one direction or the other.
Enter your address at the top of the page and every school is re-routed from your own door, leaving the next weekday at 7:45 AM Eastern — a typical time to leave for school drop-off, rather than an average across the whole day. That distinction matters more than people expect: the same trip can differ by ten minutes or more between 7:45 AM and 10:00 AM.
The est. marker disappears from any school that routed successfully. Anything that failed to route keeps its placeholder and keeps the marker — so a partial answer can never be mistaken for a complete one.
Nothing you type is stored. The address goes to this site's own endpoint, is used once to work out the routes, and is never written to a database or a log you could be identified from. The answer is kept in your own browser so it survives a reload, and you can wipe it at any time with the "Clear my address" button. It is not shared with anyone, and there is nothing here to sell.
Greenville County uses residential attendance zones. Your home address maps to exactly one public elementary school, and your child is entitled to a place there automatically — no application, no lottery, no queue. That school is your baseline, and every other option on this page is a trade against it.
Look yours up here before you do anything else. It takes thirty seconds and it is free.
If you want a different public school, there are two separate routes, with different forms, different deadlines and different odds.
All eleven themed magnet schools take applications online through Parent Backpack, separately from the lottery above. Three are elementary: Blythe Academy of Languages (partial Spanish or French immersion), East North Street Academy of Mathematics and Science (environmental studies), and Stone Academy of Communication Arts (art, music, drama and dance taught by specialists). Magnets draw from across the county, so your address does not rule you out.
South Carolina does not grade schools A to F. The official system is the SC Report Card, a five-level scale — Excellent · Good · Average · Below Average · Unsatisfactory. It blends test results, academic growth (how far children move, not just where they land), safety and school climate.
SC READY is the English and math test behind those ratings, taken in Grades 3 to 5. There is no statewide test at all in kindergarten through Grade 2 — so a rating you read today describes children three to five years ahead of your kindergartener.
Greenville County as a district runs above the state average (roughly 59% reading and 52% math, against 52% and 43% statewide), which makes it one of the stronger large districts in a middling state. That is context for every number on this page: a mid-ranked school here is not the same as a mid-ranked school nationally.
If you read one thing on this page, read this. Under the Read to Succeed Act, from 2024–25 onward a child who scores "Does Not Meet Expectations" on the Grade 3 SC READY reading test must be held back a year — unless a good-cause exemption applies. The exemptions are real and reasonably common: an IEP, English-language-learner status, a portfolio demonstrating proficiency, or successfully completing summer reading camp.
This is not a rule about kindergarten, and nothing about it should frighten you at this stage. It matters now for one reason only: it tells you what the system will eventually measure, which is reading, and it tells you that your child has about four years of runway in school before it does.
The county's gifted program is called the Challenge Program. It is a "pull-out" model — children stay at their own school and leave the classroom for gifted instruction, rather than moving school.
You cannot grade a Montessori school and a zoned public school on the same list of criteria, so this does not try to. Each school is scored against a rubric built for its own kind of school, every input is converted to the same 0–100 scale, and a criterion nobody publishes for that school is dropped and its weight shared out across the ones that remain. The whole calculation runs in your browser and the inputs are on every school's profile, so you can check the arithmetic.
Those are the weights for a district public school. Charter, magnet, private, Montessori and language-immersion schools each get their own set — a Montessori school is weighted on AMS/AMI accreditation, teacher credentialing and multi-age fidelity, an immersion school on contact hours and its immersion model alongside its academic results.
A score can only go as high as the evidence we can source for it. Several criteria are yes-or-no — accredited, multi-age, a stated curriculum — and they pay full marks when the answer is yes. Because missing answers are left out rather than counted as zero, a school with three answered questions could otherwise get a clean 100, ahead of a school measured on nine. So each school also carries a ceiling that rises with how much of its rubric is actually filled in. A complete file has no ceiling. A half-empty one cannot reach the top of the list no matter how good the few known answers are. If a school has limited data and its ceiling has been reached, its profile will say so.
Four things the Selector Score deliberately does not include. Google review ratings: the “Places API” returns no rating for anything it classes as a school — every school queried comes back blank while an ordinary business returned 4.7 stars from 1,260 reviews — so the criterion could never be filled for anybody and only dragged our completeness down. Per-pupil spending: defined from the start, never wired up, never earnable, and it quietly held every private and Montessori school below the top confidence tier. Waitlist size and lottery odds: neither the district nor any charter here publishes them, and the district's own magnet pages say the odds are not released. And "mission fit", which in practice only ever awarded a free full mark to language-immersion schools — an eight-point head start over every other charter, just for being a category rather than for being good. We continually assess this as we do our research and investigate school information and keep the Selector Score as thoughtful and useful as possible.
What the bands mean: 90+ Exceptional · 80–89 Excellent · 70–79 Above Average · 60–69 Average · 50–59 Below Average · under 50 Needs Improvement. Alongside the number, each school carries a confidence tier — High, Medium, Low or Unrated — which says how much data is behind it. The two are independent: a Medium school is not a worse school, it is a less documented one.
Where every fact comes from. “School life” tab details carry a small label saying who published them, because a meal price set by the district and a theme counted out of anonymous reviews are not the same kind of claim:
“Parent-provided” means a family asked the school directly and wrote the answer down — a price, a schedule, whether there is a bus. It is closer to the source than a review, but it is one conversation on one day and it is written down nowhere else, so confirm anything you would actually decide on by asking the school directly. “District policy” is the other one to watch: it means the district publishes this rule for all its schools and we have not confirmed it building by building. It is usually right and is exactly the sort of thing worth a one-line email or quick call to the front office.
Parent reviews are summarized, never reprinted. Each profile's “Parent voice” tab gives the star aggregate, how many people wrote and how recently, which subjects they raise, and whether each subject comes up in the reviews that praised the school or the ones that criticized it — then links out so you can read the originals and judge for yourself. An unverified claim about a named school is not ours to republish. The findings listed here are counted, not quoted, and they are counted only across the reviews the source publishes in full, which is usually fewer than the number it counts toward the average.
Every acronym you will hit in a school office, a district website, or a form — and what it actually means.
Everything that is a fixed fact rather than an opinion, in one place. Hit Print in the header (or ⌘P / Ctrl-P) and this prints cleanly — filters, buttons and navigation are stripped out automatically.
Questions worth asking on a tour, that no website answers: How many children are in a kindergarten class, actually? What happens when a child falls behind in reading? How long has the head teacher been here? What does drop-off look like at 7:45?
Every school on this page with its phone number, drive time, grade range and score. Click any name for the full profile. This table is built to print — use the Print button in the header and take it to the phone with you.
| School | Type | City | Drive | Grades | Score | Net tuition | Phone |
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