The top reported proficiency rate is 58% in Math. The lowest is 50% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on James E. Stephens Academy
James E. Stephens Academy is a public elementary school in Bartow, Florida, serving children from prekindergarten through fifth grade. It sits within Polk County Public Schools, the county's public school system, and is a conventional public school with no charter or magnet designation.
The school's enrollment is small relative to many elementary schools, with a meaningful share of that enrollment in the prekindergarten program. The student body is racially and ethnically diverse, drawing primarily Black and Hispanic students, with white students making up a smaller portion and other groups represented in smaller numbers. A large majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which places the school among those serving a high-poverty population. Data on English learner enrollment and the share of students with individualized education programs were not available.
State assessment results come from Florida's FAST and Statewide Science Assessment, tested at grades three through five. In reading, third-grade proficiency sits at a solid majority of students, a reasonable starting point, but that figure drops noticeably by fourth grade, falling below half of students, before recovering somewhat at fifth grade. Math follows a similar arc: third grade reaches well above the midpoint, fourth grade dips, and fifth grade slips to just around half. Science proficiency at fifth grade lands right at the halfway mark. Taken together, the pattern is one where third-grade results look more encouraging than the picture in the upper elementary grades. A parent who wants to understand what is driving that fourth-grade dip in both reading and math would do well to ask the school directly. Multi-year trend data was not available, so it is not possible to say whether these results reflect improvement, decline, or stability over time.
No data on chronic absenteeism, discipline, or staffing ratios was available. The comparison framework for this school produced too small a cohort to place its proficiency results against neighboring district schools in a meaningful way, so that kind of relative positioning is not possible from what was provided.
Because Stephens serves only pre-K through grade five, there is no graduation rate, and no AP or dual-enrollment program applies. Those measures simply do not fit this grade band.
The school is located in Bartow, the Polk County seat, a small city with a historic downtown organized around the courthouse square. Publicly reported accounts describe tree-lined streets of Victorian and Craftsman homes near the center, a walkable main street with diners and local shops, and a more car-dependent commercial corridor on the northern edge near Highway 60. A paved multi-use trail connects Bartow to Lakeland. The Bartow Public Library offers children's and family programming, and Mary Holland Park provides outdoor space.
Housing near the school is priced meaningfully below both the Florida and national medians, which makes the area relatively accessible for buyers compared to much of the state, though values have dipped slightly in the past year. Rents have moved modestly upward. Renters appear to spend a manageable share of income on housing by national norms, and there is a noticeable gap between estimated monthly mortgage costs and typical rents, which may factor into the rent-versus-buy calculation for families.
Bartow is in a period of active residential development on its edges, with large planned subdivisions in the pipeline, though at least one major project was recently rejected by city commissioners after resident pushback over growth pace and water capacity. That dynamic is worth watching for families thinking about how the neighborhood around the school may change in coming years.
District-level information on strategic priorities or recent programmatic changes at Polk County Public Schools was not found in time to include here, so that dimension of context is missing from this account.
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