Original Research by School Decision on St. Johns County Jail (djj)
St. Johns County Jail (DJJ) is an alternative school operated within a correctional facility in Hastings, Florida, serving students in grades seven through twelve under the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. It sits within the St. Johns County School District and is physically located on East St. Johns Avenue in Hastings, a small, unincorporated agricultural community in the rural southwest corner of the county.
The nature of this school explains most of what the data does and does not show. Enrollment at any given reporting point is extremely small, reflecting the population of incarcerated youth at the jail on a given day rather than a stable, voluntary student body. Because state academic testing is not designed for settings like this, no proficiency results or trend data are available, and that absence is a function of the setting rather than a reporting failure. There is no graduation rate reported, no chronic absenteeism measure, and no course-access data in the record. Free and reduced-price lunch rates, IEP rates, and English learner rates are also not reported; in a facility school where student identities and stays shift frequently, these figures are often not collected or released in the same way as at a conventional school. The comparison metrics relative to districts in St. Johns County do not apply here for the same reasons.
What can be said is that this school exists to provide continuity of education for young people who are detained and who would otherwise lose access to schooling entirely during their confinement. That is the defining purpose, and it shapes everything else about the record.
Hastings itself is a place worth understanding for anyone connected to this facility in a logistical sense. It is a working, agricultural community, historically built around potato farming and truck crops. The town dissolved its own government and is now unincorporated St. Johns County. Poverty rates in the community are publicly reported as elevated relative to the broader county, and most residents rent rather than own. A paved multi-use trail runs through the area, a downtown Main Street revitalization effort became an official Florida program in 2024, and surrounding rural areas are seeing new residential construction, though the community retains a distinctly rural character. Home values in the zip code are below the Florida state benchmark, and below the national benchmark as well, which reflects the area's economic profile. Renting, by the affordability figures in the data, is the more accessible option locally.
The broader St. Johns County School District passed two funding measures in late 2024. One was a new property tax dedicated to teacher salaries and student support services including school nurses and mental-health counselors; the other renewed an existing half-cent sales surtax for school construction and capital needs. Both measures reflect a district managing rapid countywide enrollment growth and making active investments in staffing and facilities. How those investments reach an alternative facility school like this one is not addressed in the available data, and a parent or advocate would want to ask the district directly about educational programming, staffing, and services provided to students at this site.
This is not a school a family selects. It serves young people in custody, and the relevant questions for anyone navigating it are about continuity of credits, reentry support, and what connections exist between this program and the student's home school upon release. The data available here does not answer those questions, and a direct conversation with the St. Johns County School District's alternative education or DJJ liaison would be the appropriate next step.
See more original research from School Decision →