The top reported proficiency rate is 70% in Science. The lowest is 24% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Long Branch Elementary School
Long Branch Elementary sits on Franklin Street in Jacksonville's urban core, serving kindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school within Duval County Public Schools. The enrollment is modest for an elementary school of its grade band, and the student body is predominantly Black, with smaller shares of white and Hispanic students. A large majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which places this squarely in the high-need tier by any Florida comparison. Data on English learners and students with IEPs was not available in the information provided.
The academic picture from Florida's most recent FAST assessments is mixed and, in several areas, warrants a candid look. Reading proficiency in the third and fifth grades came in well below the state midpoint, and fourth-grade reading was notably low. Writing that out plainly: most students tested in ELA across all three tested grades did not reach the proficient threshold. Math tells a more varied story. Fourth-grade math proficiency was a clear strength, landing at a level that compares well against state averages, and fifth-grade math was solidly above the midpoint. Third-grade math, however, was low, matching the ELA pattern at that grade level. The fifth-grade science assessment was a genuine bright spot, with a strong majority of students scoring proficient. A parent looking at this picture would reasonably want to ask the school directly about its literacy intervention approach, particularly in the earlier and middle elementary grades, and how it plans to address the gap between the stronger math and science results and the weaker reading results.
No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to characterize whether these results reflect improvement, decline, or stability. The neighbor comparison set for Duval County contained too few districts to produce a meaningful ranking, so no county-level positioning is reported here.
Long Branch is a neighborhood school, not a magnet, and no special program offerings were listed in the data provided. Whether it carries a Title I designation was not reported in the information available, though the economic profile of the student body would be consistent with such a designation; a parent may want to confirm that directly with the school or district.
The surrounding area reflects the older, denser part of Jacksonville north and east of downtown. The zip code where Long Branch sits shows home values considerably below the Florida statewide median and below the national median, and they have edged downward year over year. Rents, by contrast, have risen modestly. For families weighing a home purchase near the school, the relative affordability of the housing stock is real, and the estimated carrying cost of a typical mortgage here runs well below the Jacksonville metro average. Jacksonville broadly is in a fast-growth phase, with downtown redevelopment activity publicly reported as among the most active in the city's recent history, and the broader metro is described by regional real estate groups as one of the more active growth markets in the country. Whether that investment reaches the Franklin Street corridor in the near term is not something the data here can confirm.
Duval County Public Schools is a large urban district. The district brief search did not turn up specific recent strategic initiatives or changes that could be confirmed, so that layer is left out rather than guessed at.
For a family in or near this neighborhood, Long Branch offers a small, community-rooted school with genuinely strong fifth-grade science and solid upper-elementary math. The reading results across the school are a real gap, and a parent whose child is in the early or middle grades, or who is arriving from a school with higher literacy attainment, would benefit from a direct conversation with the principal about what additional support looks like day to day.
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