The top reported proficiency rate is 17% in English language arts. The lowest is 13% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Lake Success Academy
Lake Success Academy is an alternative school operated by Lake County Schools, located on North Georgia Avenue in Howey-in-the-Hills. It spans kindergarten through twelfth grade on paper, though in practice the enrolled population concentrates heavily in middle and high school grades, with no students enrolled in grades kindergarten through five. The school is very small, serving a handful of students across all grade levels combined, which shapes nearly every aspect of the experience here.
Because this is a designated alternative school, the usual benchmarks parents apply to a conventional school require reframing. Alternative schools in Florida typically serve students who have been referred due to disciplinary, academic, or other circumstances that made a traditional placement unsuitable. The school's purpose is to provide a pathway for students who need a different environment rather than to compete academically with a comprehensive neighborhood school. Demographic data is not available for special populations such as students with IEPs or English learners, which are fields that would normally round out the picture. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is racially diverse, with Black and Hispanic students together making up a large majority of the enrolled population.
State assessment data was reported for eighth grade only; grades six and seven were suppressed, likely because group sizes were too small to report without risking identification of individual students. The eighth-grade results that were released show proficiency rates in math, ELA, and science that are well below Florida statewide averages. Parents reading these numbers should do so with the school's alternative purpose in mind: students enrolled here are often working through significant challenges, and raw proficiency figures do not tell you much about the progress any individual student is making from their starting point. A parent wanting to understand how students are progressing academically from entry to exit would want to ask the school directly about that picture.
No program offerings data was available, and information about course access, staffing levels, attendance patterns, or discipline practices was not included in the data we reviewed. These are areas worth exploring directly with the school or with Lake County Schools.
Howey-in-the-Hills itself is a very small lakefront town on the Harris Chain of Lakes, about a half hour northwest of Orlando. Publicly reported sources describe it as retaining an old-Florida feel, with scattered orange groves, limited everyday commercial amenities, and a downtown effectively defined by a single traffic signal on State Road 19. The Mission Resort and Club, a longstanding golf and lake resort, is the town's signature employer. The community is in an active growth phase, with multiple large residential developments approved or underway and the town's first grocery anchor reportedly coming as part of one of those projects. A parcel has been reserved for a future public school within one of the planned communities. Housing values in the zip code sit modestly above the current Florida statewide median and have slipped slightly year over year.
At the district level, Lake County Schools voters renewed a school safety millage in 2022 that funds safety officers, nurses, mental health staff, and alternative education programs, the last of which directly supports schools like Lake Success Academy. A broader property tax measure is on the November 2026 ballot that would add funding for teacher pay and retention; that outcome is pending. Florida's statewide cell phone prohibition during instructional time applies here as it does across all public schools in the state.
The comparison data for Lake County lists only one district, so placing Lake Success Academy against peers in any meaningful statistical way was not possible given that constraint.
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