The top reported proficiency rate is 55% in Math. The lowest is 37% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Pines Lakes Elementary School
Pines Lakes Elementary sits on Johnson Street in Pembroke Pines, a large, auto-oriented suburb in southwest Broward County that operates largely as a residential extension of the Miami metro area. The school serves prekindergarten through fifth grade and draws from the planned subdivisions and gated communities that characterize this part of the city. Getting around requires a car; the neighborhood built environment is designed for driving, and the school itself is one of more than twenty schools distributed across separate campuses throughout town.
The school is a modest-sized elementary for its grade band. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, placing it among schools where economic need is a real part of the daily context. The student body is predominantly Hispanic and Black, with white and Asian students each making up smaller portions of enrollment and a small multiracial group rounding things out. Data on English learners and students with individualized education programs were not available in the records we reviewed, so parents with children in either group may want to ask the school directly about support services.
On Florida's FAST assessments, the picture is mixed and worth a clear-eyed look. In third grade, roughly over half of students tested proficient in math, while ELA proficiency was below half. By fourth grade, math proficiency climbed to above two-thirds, which is a notably stronger result, and ELA rose to just over half. Fifth grade pulled back in both subjects, with math falling well below the third-grade level and ELA in a similar range. On the fifth-grade statewide science assessment, fewer than four in ten students scored proficient. Multi-year trend data was not available, so it is not possible from this data to say whether results are improving, holding steady, or declining. Parents who want to understand trajectory should ask the school about its internal progress data. Because the comparison set for Broward County contained only one district, a peer comparison was not possible from the data provided.
No program offerings were listed in the data we reviewed, so specific enrichment, gifted, dual-language, or STEM tracks at Pines Lakes cannot be described here. That is worth asking the school about directly, since Florida elementary schools often carry program designations that do not surface in this data set.
The housing market around the school reflects the broader Pembroke Pines reality: home values in the zip code sit meaningfully above both the Florida state median and the national median, and have ticked down modestly year over year. Rents are high relative to income, with the rent-to-income ratio in the area running well above what housing economists consider affordable. For buyers, the estimated monthly carrying cost for a median-priced home at current mortgage rates is substantial. This is not an inexpensive place to live, and the affordability pressure is real for families considering a move to be in this school's attendance zone.
The city itself offers genuine day-to-day infrastructure. The Pines City Center development has created a walkable mixed-use district around Pines Boulevard and Palm Avenue with dining, retail, and civic facilities including a new city center and Charles F. Dodge City Center complex. Parks are plentiful, with C.B. Smith Park and Chapel Trail Nature Preserve among the larger green spaces. Multiple Broward County Library branches serve the area, including a regional branch that shares a building with a high school media center and offers multilingual resources. Broward County Transit routes reach the city, supplemented by the city's own community bus lines connecting neighborhoods to schools, hospitals, and commercial centers. Healthcare anchors in and near the city include Memorial Hospital West.
For Broward County Public Schools district-level changes that might affect Pines Lakes, the research search was exhausted without finding confirmed recent updates, so that information was left out rather than guessed at.
What Pines Lakes offers is a neighborhood elementary in a high-cost, heavily residential suburban city, with a demographically diverse student body, mixed academic results that are stronger in the middle elementary grades than at the ends, and limited program detail available in public data. Families considering it would do well to visit, ask about specific supports for their child's needs, and request the school's own account of its academic direction.
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