The top reported proficiency rate is 61% in English language arts. The lowest is 56% in Math.
Original Research by School Decision on Blountstown Elementary School
Blountstown Elementary sits on Main Street in Blountstown, the county seat of Calhoun County in Florida's Panhandle, a rural small-town community shaped by the Apalachicola River, agriculture, and pine forest. The town has a compact historic downtown, a paved greenway connecting neighborhoods to the river, and daily life anchored by parks, a public library, and local civic institutions. There is no fixed-route public transit. The housing market here is notably more affordable than Florida as a whole, with home values well below the statewide midpoint, though the market has seen a slight recent dip.
The school's defining recent story is its building. The original campus was completely destroyed by Hurricane Michael in 2018, and for roughly six years students were split across multiple campuses and learning in portable classrooms. Publicly reported accounts confirm that a brand-new facility opened in August 2024 on the original site, reuniting all PreK through fifth-grade students under one modern roof for the first time since the storm. For any family enrolling now, that prolonged period of disruption is over, and the school they are entering is a newly built campus.
Enrollment is moderate for a PreK-5 elementary school. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which reflects the broader economic profile of Calhoun County, an area where health care, food service, and public administration are among the primary employment sectors. Racial and ethnic composition is majority white with a meaningful share of Black students and smaller shares of Hispanic and multiracial students. Data on English learner and special education populations was not available in the source data.
On Florida's FAST assessments, the school's results in the most recent year are mixed. In ELA, the fourth-grade cohort performed at a level that exceeds bare majority proficiency, which is the strongest result in the data set. Third-grade ELA and third-grade math both come in just under or at roughly the same level. Fourth-grade math and fifth-grade science land in a similar range. Fifth-grade ELA and fifth-grade math sit below those, with the fifth-grade math result the lowest across the tested grades. The overall picture is that most of the tested cohorts are close to the halfway mark, with some grades reaching somewhat above it and the fifth-grade results running somewhat below. There is no multi-year trend data available, so it is not possible from this data to characterize whether proficiency is rising, stable, or declining. A parent who wants to understand whether the school's academic trajectory is improving following the years of disruption would want to ask the school directly about trend data and any targeted supports in place.
Chronic absenteeism and graduation rate metrics do not apply here: the school serves only PreK through fifth grade, so no graduation rate is reported, and absenteeism data was not available in the source data. A comparison against other districts in Calhoun County was not usable because there is only one district in the county.
Information on specific programs, extracurriculars, staffing ratios, or discipline practices was not included in the source data, so those dimensions were left out rather than estimated.
What Blountstown Elementary represents, in plain terms, is a small-town elementary school in a rural, economically modest community that has gone through an extraordinary disruption and is now, as of the fall of 2024, operating in a new permanent building. Academic proficiency is in a range that is neither sharply high nor sharply low, with variation across grades and subjects. Families who value a small-community setting, who are drawn to or already rooted in the Blountstown area, and who want to understand the school's academic direction will find the new building a genuine fresh start, with the test score picture worth exploring further with school staff.
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