Smart Pope Livingston Elementary, Jacksonville FL

Original Research by School Decision on Smart Pope Livingston Elementary

Smart Pope Livingston Elementary sits on Barber Street in Jacksonville, Florida, serving children from pre-kindergarten through second grade. Because the school's grade band stops at second grade, state standardized testing does not apply to the children enrolled there now. The assessment data in the payload is from an earlier period when the school served grades through fifth, and those results showed proficiency rates in reading, math, and science that were low by Florida standards. That earlier snapshot does not describe the current school's grade range, so parents should not treat it as a measure of what today's PK-2 students are experiencing. There is no graduation rate here, and none would be expected from a school that serves only the earliest grades.

The student body is predominantly Black, with smaller shares of Hispanic, white, and multiracial students. A very large share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, placing this among the higher-poverty schools by that measure. Data on English learners and students with IEPs was not available in the payload.

The surrounding neighborhood sits in the northwestern part of Jacksonville, a city that is large, sprawling, and heavily car-dependent outside a few walkable pockets downtown and in older districts like Riverside and San Marco. The Barber Street address is a residential area well removed from those walkable cores. Jacksonville overall is in a period of rapid growth, publicly reported as one of the faster-expanding metro areas in the country, with major downtown development underway including new residential projects, a stadium renovation, and a University of Florida graduate campus. That growth context shapes the broader city but does not yet transform the immediate neighborhood around this school.

Housing costs near the school are well below both the Florida statewide median and the national median, making this one of the more affordable ZIP codes in the Jacksonville market. Rents have edged up modestly in the past year while home values have slipped slightly, a pattern that reflects affordability pressures in the rental market even where ownership costs remain low relative to the region.

The school is a regular public school within Duval County Public Schools, Florida's fourth-largest district. It is not a charter and carries no magnet designation. No program offerings were listed in the data. The district brief search was exhausted without confirming specific recent parent-relevant changes at the district level, so district strategic priorities were left out rather than guessed.

For a family with children in the PK-2 range, this is an accessible neighborhood school in a lower-cost part of Jacksonville. The economic profile of the student body reflects the surrounding community. Because no current standardized testing applies to these grade levels and the older testing data reflects a different configuration of the school, a parent who wants to understand academic outcomes and program quality today would do well to visit the school directly and ask about early literacy approaches, reading intervention supports, and what assessments the school uses internally in the primary grades.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 336%

School 36% · District 59% · ▼ 23 pts below district

▼ 27 pts below state median · ▼ 21 pts below county median

Grade 436%

School 36% · District 60% · ▼ 24 pts below district

▼ 25 pts below state median · ▼ 20 pts below county median

Grade 513%

School 13% · District 54% · ▼ 41 pts below district

▼ 42 pts below state median · ▼ 37 pts below county median

English language arts

Grade 313%

School 13% · District 51% · ▼ 38 pts below district

▼ 43 pts below state median · ▼ 36 pts below county median

Grade 413%

School 13% · District 50% · ▼ 36 pts below district

▼ 41 pts below state median · ▼ 33 pts below county median

Grade 519%

School 19% · District 50% · ▼ 30 pts below district

▼ 35 pts below state median · ▼ 26 pts below county median

Science

Grade 522%

School 22% · District 52% · ▼ 30 pts below district

▼ 31 pts below state median · ▼ 24 pts below county median

This schoolDUVAL, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.

Proficiency by household income

English language arts

Grade 3Lower-income13%Higher-income15%2 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income12%Higher-income18%6 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income17%Higher-income40%23 pp gap

Mathematics

Grade 3Lower-income37%Higher-income31%6 pp gap

Grade 4Lower-income34%Higher-income44%10 pp gap

Grade 5Lower-income14%Higher-income0%14 pp gap