 The 50th anniversary of the school was marked with a celebration on May 22, 2009.Hearst Elementary was one of 11 San Diego Unified School District campuses honored for academic excellence by California Business for Academic Excellence, a group representing member businesses in the state.However, despite their relatively high score of 902 on California's Academic Performance Index, which assigns schools a score between 200 and 1,000 points, they scored only 2 out of 10 on the "similar-schools ranking" measure, which compares institutions with similar ethnic compositions; their scores fell after the similar-schools ranking was adjusted to account for the number of students whose ethnicity was unspecified.