The top reported proficiency rate is 37% in Science. The lowest is 27% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Young Mens/womens Leadership Academy at Eugene J Butler
The Young Men's/Women's Leadership Academy at Eugene J. Butler is a public middle school serving sixth through eighth grade in Jacksonville, Florida, operated by Duval County Public Schools. Its name signals an intentional identity: a school organized around leadership development for young people at a formative stage, situated on Acorn Street in a part of Jacksonville that sits well outside the city's more affluent suburban corridors.
The school is small relative to many middle schools in a district as large as Duval. Its student body is predominantly Black, with smaller shares of Hispanic and white students. A large majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which points to a high-poverty enrollment context. Data on students with IEPs or English learner designations was not available in what was provided.
On Florida's FAST assessments, the most recent results show that proficiency in reading and math for sixth and seventh graders sits well below the state midpoint, with roughly one in four students reaching proficiency in ELA across all three grade levels. Math proficiency follows a similar pattern for the younger grades, though eighth graders performed meaningfully better than their sixth- and seventh-grade peers in math. Eighth-grade science results land in the mid-range, below a majority but not at the floor. These are the facts as reported; a parent who wants to understand how the school's approach is addressing these gaps, and what supports are in place, would benefit from asking the school directly. No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say whether results are improving, stable, or declining.
The school's program details were not available in the data provided. Given the leadership-focused name, families would reasonably want to ask the school what that means concretely: whether there are structured advisory periods, mentoring, community service requirements, leadership coursework, or other practices that distinguish the day-to-day experience from a conventional middle school. Those details matter for deciding whether the identity of the school is a good match for a particular child.
The surrounding neighborhood carries a housing market that looks quite different from Jacksonville's broader picture. Home values in the immediate zip code are a fraction of the Florida statewide median, and they have dipped modestly over the past year even as rents have edged up slightly. For a family renting in this part of the city, the rent-to-income picture sits near the national norm, and the area remains among the more affordable zip codes in Jacksonville.
Jacksonville itself is a large, sprawling city undergoing substantial downtown reinvestment, publicly reported as one of the faster-growing metros in the country. The school's location, north of downtown, places it closer to the city's historic core than to the suburban commercial districts of Southside or the St. Johns Town Center. The city is heavily car-dependent outside a handful of walkable neighborhoods; transit through the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, including the downtown Skyway and the bus network centered at the Rosa Parks Transit Station, serves the broader urban area, though how convenient that network is for any specific family depends on where they live relative to the school's Acorn Street address.
No district-level strategic priorities for Duval County Public Schools were confirmed in the research, so that piece of context was left out rather than assumed.
What this school offers, in plain terms, is a focused identity around leadership for middle schoolers, a small and predominantly Black peer community in a high-poverty setting, and academic results that are currently well below state norms in most tested areas. Whether that combination fits a family depends on what they are looking for: a school with a clear mission and an intimate environment, where the leadership framing may be compelling, alongside an honest conversation with the school about what academic support looks like in practice.
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