The top reported proficiency rate is 44% in Math. The lowest is 39% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Bradford Middle School
Bradford Middle School sits on North Orange Street in Starke, the county seat of Bradford County in northeast Florida, serving grades six through eight. It is the middle school within a single-district county, meaning essentially every public middle schooler in Bradford County attends here.
Starke itself is a small city shaped by a working economy rather than a bedroom-community one. The largest employers, publicly reported, are corrections facilities including Florida State Prison and Union Correctional Institution, alongside healthcare, manufacturing through operations like E.I. DuPont, trucking, retail, and the school district itself. A historic downtown runs along Call Street, and a rail trail on a former Georgia Southern line connects the area to a wider corridor. The housing market here sits well below both state and national medians, and home values have seen modest year-over-year appreciation. No rental index data was available for this area. For families relocating, Bradford County's position midway between Jacksonville, Gainesville, and Lake City gives it regional access despite its rural-small-city character.
Academically, the picture at Bradford Middle is mixed and worth examining closely. On the most recent Florida FAST assessments, grade-level proficiency in seventh-grade math and eighth-grade ELA came in below half of all students tested. Eighth-grade math was the strongest result among the subjects measured, with roughly half of students scoring proficient. Seventh-grade ELA and eighth-grade science both landed in the upper thirties. These figures are below what many families would hope to see heading into high school, and a parent looking at readiness for higher-level coursework in ninth grade may want to ask the school directly about how it identifies and supports students who are not yet on grade level.
Some context is useful here. The district as a whole, publicly reported, showed meaningful improvement on state assessments in 2024-25, with gains across several grade levels compared to the prior year. The district brief notes that middle-grade ELA and seventh-grade math remained areas needing continued work even within that broader positive trend, which aligns with what the school-level data shows. Year-over-year trend data for this school specifically was not available in the data provided.
The student body is predominantly white with a substantial Black student population and smaller shares of Hispanic and multiracial students. A majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the working-class economic profile of the surrounding community. Data on students with IEPs and English learners was not reported in the data available here.
The district has publicly reported implementing a district-wide instructional model built around Renaissance Star assessments in reading, math, and early literacy, used from kindergarten through twelfth grade to track individual student progress and guide classroom instruction. Families receive a parent-facing progress report from this system, and students are pointed toward a digital reading platform for at-home use. This is a concrete and consistent approach to tracking where each child stands, which can be valuable for parents who want regular data on their student's growth rather than waiting for annual test results.
Program details, course access, staffing information, and discipline data were not available in what was provided. The school's single-county comparison set includes only one district, so a meaningful peer comparison on proficiency or attendance was not possible from this data.
For a family moving to Starke or already there, Bradford Middle is the public option for grades six through eight, and there is no charter or magnet alternative identified in this data. The academic results as they stand suggest a school where a meaningful share of students arrive at eighth grade not yet proficient on state measures, which is worth discussing with the school to understand what support structures are in place and where individual students land within that distribution.
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