The top reported proficiency rate is 75% in Math. The lowest is 67% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Forest Lakes Elementary School
Forest Lakes Elementary sits on Pine Avenue in Oldsmar, a residential suburb pressed against Old Tampa Bay on the western edge of Pinellas County. The school serves pre-kindergarten through fifth grade as a regular public school in the Pinellas County Schools district, with an enrollment that places it in a moderate size range for its grade band.
The community around the school is genuinely mixed in character. Oldsmar carries a small-town, family-oriented feel that goes back generations, yet it also hosts a dense cluster of industrial and office parks employing companies ranging from healthcare firms to defense contractors. Publicly reported sources describe commercial growth as brisk, with new restaurants, hotels, and expanded roads. A downtown redevelopment effort near City Hall has been in motion for years and picked up pace recently, with a mixed-use project authorized in 2024 and a townhome development that broke ground in 2025. Three larger projects are advancing in 2026, one of them filed under Florida's Live Local Act, which limits the city's ability to block qualifying workforce-housing developments. Families buying here are entering a place that is changing, not static.
Housing in the area has softened. Home values sit close to the state and national midpoints but have moved downward year over year by a meaningful margin, a steeper decline than the statewide average. Rents have also dipped. For a buyer, the estimated monthly mortgage on a typical home consumes a manageable but real share of income, and the rent-to-income ratio falls near the lower threshold of what housing researchers consider stretched. A voter-approved property-tax increase in November 2024 doubled Pinellas County Schools' local-option school levy for the next several years, supporting teacher and staff bonuses and programs in reading, music, art, and technology. Prospective homebuyers would weigh that recurring cost.
On academics, the most recent Florida FAST results show a clear strength at the entry point of state testing. Third-grade math proficiency is well above the majority of what Florida schools report, a genuine standout. ELA in third grade is solid, and fifth-grade science comes in comfortably above the midpoint. The picture shifts as grades advance. Math proficiency drops noticeably from third to fourth and again to fifth, and ELA follows a similar downward slope, with fifth-grade reading landing below the majority threshold. These patterns are worth asking the school about directly, specifically whether the decline reflects test-cohort variation, curriculum pacing, or a more persistent trend. Trend data was not available in the underlying data, so a single year's results are all we can characterize here.
The Pinellas district itself has been putting real effort into early literacy. It built a custom ELA curriculum aligned to Florida's B.E.S.T. standards using a science-of-reading approach, starting in the youngest grades, and the district earned its first-ever state "A" grade in 2024. That curriculum context matters for Forest Lakes, since the school's third-grade ELA results land in positive territory.
About a third of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a moderate economic share. The school's racial and ethnic composition is majority white, with a substantial Hispanic population and smaller shares of other groups. Data on students with IEPs and English learners was not reported in the underlying data, so those populations cannot be characterized here.
The school is not a charter or magnet school and carries no Title I designation in the data provided. Program details were not available, so specific enrichment offerings, intervention supports, or extracurricular activities could not be described. A visit or conversation with the front office would be the right way to fill that gap.
For a family focused on early-elementary academics, the third-grade results are a genuine strength. The question to press on is whether that momentum carries forward, because the upper-elementary data tells a different story that warrants a closer look.
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