Original Research by School Decision on Strive Academy
Strive Academy is a public alternative school in Largo, Florida, serving grades six through twelve within the Pinellas County school district. Alternative schools in Florida typically serve students who need a different educational setting than a traditional school, whether due to academic, behavioral, or other circumstances, so the population and program structure differ considerably from a conventional middle or high school.
The data available for Strive Academy is sparse. Enrollment figures show as zero across all grades in the most recent reporting, and demographic breakdowns including race, ethnicity, free and reduced price lunch participation, special education counts, and English learner counts are either reported as zero or listed as missing. This is unusual and worth asking the school about directly. It may reflect a reporting gap, a period of transition, or the nature of how the school's data gets submitted to federal systems. State assessment results, graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, and staffing data are all absent from this profile. Because Strive is classified as an alternative school, some of these gaps are common for settings like this, where tested grades, attendance tracking, and graduation pathways can be structured differently than at traditional schools. Still, the missing data is substantial enough that a parent should contact the school directly to understand current enrollment, who the school serves, and what the academic and support program looks like on the ground.
On the district side, Pinellas County Schools has had some publicly reported developments that bear on the schools within it. Voters in late 2024 approved renewing and expanding a local-option school property tax, roughly doubling the rate, which provides ongoing funding for teacher and staff bonuses as well as reading, music, art, and technology programs. For a prospective homebuyer in the area, this represents a recurring property tax cost worth factoring in alongside the housing numbers. Home values in the Largo zip code sit close to the Florida statewide median and the national median, though both have dipped modestly over the past year. Rents have also eased slightly. At current mortgage rates, ownership costs are meaningful, and renting runs somewhat cheaper on a monthly basis than carrying a mortgage, though the gap is not wide.
The district also made a curriculum shift that has drawn attention: Pinellas developed its own English language arts curriculum aligned to Florida's B.E.S.T. standards and built around a science of reading approach, starting in the earliest grades and extending upward. Publicly reported accounts credit this shift, in part, with the district earning its first-ever top state school grade in 2024. That context matters for families with younger children at traditional Pinellas schools, though how much it touches the alternative school program at Strive specifically is not clear from available data.
For any family considering Strive Academy, the honest starting point is that this profile cannot answer the most basic questions a parent would ask: how many students attend, what does a typical day look like, what academic or support services are available, and what outcomes do students achieve. Those answers exist at the school itself. The locale research for Largo returned no usable results before the search budget was exhausted, so a detailed picture of the surrounding neighborhood was not available and was left out rather than approximated.
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