The top reported proficiency rate is 61% in Math. The lowest is 54% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Imater Academy
iMater Academy sits on West 20th Street in Hialeah, a densely populated, predominantly Cuban-American city in northwest Miami-Dade. The school serves kindergarten through fifth grade as a public charter, and its student body is almost entirely Hispanic, with the overwhelming majority of families qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. This is a school shaped by its community: working-class, Spanish-speaking, and embedded in a neighborhood where Cuban culture is the everyday fabric rather than a backdrop.
The school is a meaningful size for an elementary charter, with enrollment distributed fairly evenly across grades. Kindergarten draws a smaller cohort than the upper elementary grades, suggesting the school has been growing into its current footprint.
On Florida's FAST assessments, iMater Academy's results are in the solidly passing range across the board but not at the top of the state distribution. Third graders score above majority-proficient in both reading and math, and fourth grade math is similarly strong. Fifth grade math and science land at just above half of students proficient, and fourth grade ELA is the softest mark, just below that midpoint. The pattern is consistent enough across grades and subjects to read as real performance, not a single outlier grade. Families should understand these are not the results of a highly selective school drawing from across the county; they reflect a school serving a high-need population and producing results that are generally competitive. A parent who wants to probe further might ask the school directly how specific grade cohorts have progressed over time, since the data provided does not include multi-year trend lines.
English learner and special education enrollment rates were not reported in the data provided, which is a gap worth raising with the school, particularly for families navigating either of those services. Given that nearly all students are Hispanic and a very large share qualify for federal meal assistance, families with English learner children would be wise to ask specifically about the school's language support programs.
Program information was not available in the data provided, so the breadth of extracurricular or enrichment offerings at iMater Academy is an open question parents would need to take up with the school directly.
The neighborhood context matters here. Hialeah is not a suburb in the conventional sense. It is dense, industrial in pockets, and walkable in corridors but largely car-dependent across its full footprint. Publicly reported sources describe significant transit-oriented development underway near the city's Metrorail and Tri-Rail stations, with multiple large residential projects expected to add housing stock over the next few years. That construction activity will likely shift the city's demographics and housing costs incrementally, though home values in the zip code are already well above the Florida statewide median and rents consume a substantial share of a typical local income. For families renting, the rent-to-income ratio in this part of Hialeah is notably high by national standards.
At the district level, Miami-Dade's publicly reported enrollment decline has prompted the district to propose closing or consolidating up to nine schools. iMater Academy is a charter and sits outside the traditional district attendance boundary system, so boundary reassignments are less likely to affect it directly, but families should track whether the consolidation process affects feeder patterns or peer schools in the area. A voter-approved property tax increase, in effect through 2027, is funding teacher pay and campus safety staffing across Miami-Dade schools, including charter schools that participate in district programs, though parents should confirm with the school what district funding flows apply to their specific situation. A statewide cell phone policy is also working its way toward implementation, which will eventually shape classroom rules here as it will across Florida.
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