The top reported proficiency rate is 50% in Math. The lowest is 42% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Belmont Elementary School
Belmont Elementary sits on Gate Dancer Road in Sun City Center, a place whose built environment tells you almost everything you need to know about the context this school operates in. Sun City Center is a large, age-restricted, unincorporated retirement community in southern Hillsborough County, developed originally in the 1960s specifically for residents aged 55 and older. Its streets, golf-cart paths, shopping plazas, and medical facilities are oriented entirely around older adults. Publicly reported sources note that the community's age restrictions generally bar anyone under 18 from residing there more than a brief period per year. Belmont Elementary, then, is a Hillsborough County public school that draws its families from newer residential subdivisions growing up outside the original retirement core, particularly those developing beyond the community's main arterial roads. That growth context matters: the surrounding area has been adding younger families even as the retirement community itself winds down new home construction.
The school runs from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, though sixth grade is listed in the school's directory; enrollment data shows no sixth-grade students currently, so the operative grade band for instruction and testing is PK through five. The student body is meaningfully diverse in racial and ethnic composition, with Black and Hispanic students together making up the clear majority of enrollment, white students representing a smaller share, and students of two or more races adding further breadth. Close to half of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a substantial economic range that families should factor into how they think about peer context and school resource demands.
On Florida's state assessments, FAST ELA and FAST Math scores for the most recent school year show mixed results across the tested grades. In reading, proficiency in third and fifth grade lands near or just above half of students, while fourth grade falls meaningfully below that mark. Math follows a similar pattern: fifth grade is the strongest showing, third grade is near the midpoint, and fourth grade again trails. The fifth-grade science assessment shows roughly four in ten students scoring proficient. These results are not catastrophically low, but they are not strong, and fourth grade stands out as a year where both reading and math proficiency are noticeably softer than the grades around it. A parent considering Belmont may want to ask the school directly about what additional support or intervention looks like at that grade level, and what the school does to address the dip. Multi-year trend data was not available, so it is not possible to say whether these numbers represent progress, regression, or a stable baseline.
No information about specific program offerings was provided. Civil rights data was absent from the payload, and figures for English learners and students with IEPs were not reported, so those dimensions of the school cannot be characterized here. Attendance and chronic absenteeism data were also not available.
The housing market around the school sits below both the Florida state median and the national median for home values, and values in this zip code have declined year over year, which may make the area more accessible for families buying in relative to other parts of the Tampa region. Rents have moved slightly upward. Homeowners in Hillsborough County should be aware that voters approved a multi-year property tax referendum in November 2024, publicly reported as adding a levy running from mid-2025 through mid-2029, designed to fund teacher and staff salary supplements and address staffing shortages across the district. That is a direct and ongoing cost for homeowners to account for when budgeting.
Hillsborough also completed a significant district-wide boundary rezoning for the 2024-25 school year, affecting a large number of schools and tens of thousands of students. Families new to the area should confirm their current assigned school directly with the district, since those boundaries were recently redrawn and further adjustments remain possible.
Belmont is the kind of school where the surrounding community context is genuinely unusual for a family with elementary-age children. The retirement village infrastructure was not built for young families, so daily life off-campus will feel different here than in a more conventionally family-oriented suburb. The school's test results warrant close attention, particularly at the fourth-grade level, and families would do well to visit the campus and ask specific questions about academic support structures before making an enrollment decision.
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