The top reported proficiency rate is 89% in Math. The lowest is 75% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Alachua Learning Academy Elementary
Alachua Learning Academy Elementary is a small charter school in the city of Alachua, serving children from kindergarten through fifth grade. With an enrollment roughly the size of a single grade level at a large suburban school, every classroom here operates in an environment where teachers almost certainly know each student by name. The school sits on State Road 235, outside the walkable historic downtown core, in a part of North Central Florida that blends a small-town Southern character with a growing biotech corridor near I-75.
The academic results from Florida's most recent FAST assessments are a genuine strength. Math proficiency across the tested upper grades is strikingly high, with fourth and fifth graders performing at or near the ceiling of the scale and third graders well above what you would typically expect statewide. ELA tells a more textured story: third grade reading proficiency is noticeably lower than the math picture, though fourth and fifth grades come in solidly. Fifth grade science proficiency is strong. Taken together, the school's overall proficiency index lands above the midpoint relative to districts in Alachua County, and sits very close to the top of that comparison set. That is a meaningful result for a school of this size and composition. No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say how these results compare to prior years.
About two in five students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, suggesting a mixed socioeconomic mix rather than a uniformly affluent or uniformly high-need population. The school's racial composition is majority white, with Hispanic students representing the next largest group and smaller shares of Asian and multiracial students. IEP and English learner data were not reported in the available records, so parents of children with disabilities or those acquiring English should ask the school directly about support services and staffing.
Because this is a charter school, enrollment is a choice parents make rather than an assignment based on address. The school's small scale is the defining feature of the experience: classrooms are intimate, the community is tight-knit by default, and the range of elective and extracurricular programming available will naturally be narrower than what a large neighborhood elementary might offer. Program details were not available in the data, so families with specific interests in the arts, sports, or enrichment activities would want to ask about those directly.
The city of Alachua itself is in a phase of real growth. The Progress District on the city's edge, home to a cluster of bioscience and technology companies including a Thermo Fisher Scientific presence and the UF Innovate Sid Martin Biotech incubator, has drawn steady in-migration. A large mixed-use development broke ground in 2022 adjacent to Progress Park, adding new housing alongside research and commercial space. Home values in the zip code sit slightly below the Florida state benchmark and have dipped modestly over the past year, while rents are running at a level that represents roughly a quarter of median household income nationally, putting the area in a relatively accessible range compared to hotter Florida markets. That said, mortgage carrying costs on a typical home here are still a real consideration at current rates.
The parent district, Alachua County Public Schools, renewed its One Mill property tax in November 2024, publicly reported as sustaining funding for arts, music, school nurses, librarians, counselors, and career-technical programs through mid-2029. Whether and how that district-level funding flows to a charter school is worth confirming with the school, since charter funding relationships with the authorizing district can vary.
Alachua Learning Academy Elementary is likely to appeal most to families who want small-scale, community-close elementary schooling with strong tested outcomes in math and solid performance in the upper grades across subjects, and who are comfortable with the open-enrollment charter model. The third-grade reading picture is the one area a parent may want to explore further in conversation with school leadership.
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