The top reported proficiency rate is 68% in Math. The lowest is 54% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Carr Elementary & Middle School
Carr Elementary & Middle School sits at a rural crossroads in Clarksville, an unincorporated community in the western reaches of Calhoun County in the Florida Panhandle. There is no town center here in any conventional sense, just forest, farmland, scattered homes, and the school itself on State Road 73. Publicly reported sources describe the community as car-dependent and low-density, with the school functioning as one of the primary civic anchors alongside the Juniper Creek Wildlife Management Area and the nearby Chipola Experimental Forest. For families weighing where to live, home values in this area are well below the Florida statewide median, and the housing stock runs mostly to detached single-family homes and mobile homes, almost all owner-occupied. The market has been essentially flat in recent months.
The school takes students from pre-kindergarten straight through eighth grade, which means a child can spend nearly a decade in one building before moving on to Blountstown High School, roughly a short drive east at the county seat. That continuity is a genuine characteristic of this setting: teachers and families tend to know each other across multiple grade levels, and the peer group stays largely the same. Enrollment is small relative to what most families would encounter in a suburban Florida school. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the economic profile of the surrounding rural community. The student body is predominantly white, with small Hispanic and multiracial populations and very few students from other racial or ethnic groups. Data on English learners and students with IEPs were not available in the data we reviewed.
On Florida's FAST assessments, math proficiency ranges from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties across most tested grades, with the seventh-grade cohort reporting full proficiency in math, though that result should be read carefully given the very small class sizes involved. A single grade with a small group of students can produce an unusually high or low figure that says more about that cohort's composition than about school-wide performance. The eighth-grade math result was suppressed, likely for the same reason: too few students to report without risking identification. In ELA, results are somewhat stronger and more consistent, with most grades landing in the low-to-mid sixties and the seventh grade reaching the high seventies. Science proficiency at both tested grade levels sits just above or below the mid-fifties. None of these results are particularly low for a rural Florida school serving a high-poverty community, but parents looking for above-state-average proficiency rates should look into this more closely with the school. Multi-year trend data were not available, so it is not possible to say from this data whether performance has been moving up or down.
No information on program offerings, AP or dual-enrollment pathways, chronic absenteeism, or discipline was available in the data. Because the school serves only through eighth grade, graduation rate data does not apply here. The comparison framework found only one district in Calhoun County, so no meaningful peer comparison among county districts was possible.
One notable change affecting the broader Calhoun County district: a brand-new Blountstown Elementary School opened in August 2024, replacing the campus destroyed by Hurricane Michael years earlier. Prior to that opening, younger students in Blountstown had been split across multiple sites in portable classrooms. That change does not directly affect Carr, which is a separate campus in Clarksville, but it reflects the district's ongoing recovery from that storm and its investment in rebuilding its facilities.
For a family already rooted in the Clarksville area, Carr is the local school, and the combination of pre-K through eighth grade in one place has real practical value in a spread-out rural county. For a family relocating and weighing options, the tradeoffs are the ones that come with any genuinely rural setting: affordable housing, tight-knit community, limited on-site program breadth, and a landscape that requires a car for nearly everything.
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