The top reported proficiency rate is 49% in English language arts. The lowest is 41% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Lakewood Elementary School
Lakewood Elementary sits on the south side of St. Petersburg, serving children from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school in the Pinellas County district. The school draws from a neighborhood that reflects a city in active transition, and understanding what this school is requires looking at both the academic picture and the community around it.
The student body is predominantly Black, with smaller shares of white, Hispanic, and multiracial students. A large majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, placing this school among those serving a high-poverty population. Data on English learners and students with IEPs were not available in the records reviewed.
On Florida's state assessments, Lakewood's results from the most recent year tell a mixed and mostly modest story. In third grade, ELA proficiency was the clearest relative strength, with well over half of students reaching the bar. Math at the fourth-grade level sat roughly at half. Science at fifth grade came in around two in five students proficient. Fifth-grade ELA and third-grade math were lower, each in the low-to-mid third of students. These results sit below where many families would hope for their children to be, and parents would be well-served asking the school directly how early reading intervention, small-group instruction, and math support are structured, and what data they use to track individual student progress across the grades.
One district-level development is directly relevant here. Pinellas County Schools publicly reported earning its first-ever top state grade in 2024, a result the district ties to a custom-built ELA curriculum grounded in the science of reading, rolled out starting in the early elementary grades. The school's third-grade ELA result may reflect the beginning of that work landing in the classroom; the weaker fifth-grade reading result suggests gains have not yet moved evenly across all grade levels. Whether and how deeply that curriculum shift has taken hold at Lakewood specifically is a fair question for prospective families to raise with the school directly.
In November 2024, Pinellas County voters approved renewing and expanding the local school property tax, doubling the rate for the coming years. The funds support teacher and staff bonuses as well as reading, music, art, and technology programming. For families considering buying a home in this attendance zone, this is a recurring cost worth factoring into a housing calculation. For families already here, it represents a stabilizing commitment to the programs and staffing that schools like Lakewood rely on.
The housing market around the school, in the zip code that covers this part of south St. Petersburg, shows home values running below the Florida state benchmark and also below the national median, and values have declined modestly year over year. Rents have similarly softened. That relative affordability, in a city that is otherwise experiencing a sustained building boom and rising costs in its core neighborhoods, makes this part of St. Petersburg more accessible than much of the metro. Estimated monthly housing costs here consume a meaningful but not extreme share of a typical household's income.
St. Petersburg itself offers substantial civic infrastructure. The city has a compact, walkable downtown with an active arts and dining scene anchored by the Central Avenue corridor, a waterfront park network, a renovated main library, and bus rapid transit connecting downtown to the beaches. Major employers span finance, health care, electronics manufacturing, and marine science. The school sits south of the downtown core, in a neighborhood that is residential in character, with that urban fabric close but not immediately adjacent.
Trend data across multiple years was not available for Lakewood, so it is not possible to say whether results have been improving, flat, or declining. That is a gap worth filling through a direct conversation with the school or the district.
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