The top reported proficiency rate is 56% in English language arts. The lowest is 44% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Wildwood Intermediate School
Wildwood Intermediate School serves third through sixth graders in Wildwood, Florida, a community in Sumter County. The school is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet program, and sits within the Sumter County School District.
On Florida's FAST assessments, the school's results vary by grade and subject. Third-grade results in both math and ELA were suppressed in the state data, likely due to small group size, so no picture of third-grade performance is available. In fourth grade, math proficiency sits above the midpoint and ELA falls somewhat below it. Fifth grade shows the softest math numbers among the reported grades, with well under half of students testing proficient, while ELA in fifth grade is closer to the middle range. Sixth grade rebounds in both subjects, with ELA and math both approaching or passing the majority mark. The fifth-grade state science assessment shows roughly four in ten students reaching proficiency. Across the board, the pattern is uneven rather than uniformly strong or uniformly weak, and parents who want to dig deeper into specific grade-level trends would be well served asking the school about its academic supports and intervention programs.
A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which places this school in an economically mixed-to-higher-need context. The student body is racially and ethnically diverse, with sizable Black, white, and Hispanic populations and a smaller share identifying as two or more races. Data on students with IEPs and English learners was not available in this dataset, so those populations cannot be characterized here.
The comparison framework for Sumter County has only one district, so no meaningful peer comparison on proficiency, graduation rates, or chronic absenteeism was possible.
The broader district context is one of active growth. Sumter County has been adding permanent classroom space at multiple schools, publicly reported as a response to population-driven enrollment pressure and a desire to move away from portable classrooms. A separate publicly reported development is the expansion of The Villages Charter School, a workplace-eligibility charter that completed a major campus addition in fall 2023. That school operates under a charter approved by the Sumter County Board of Education and is open to children of parents employed by The Villages, which makes it a school-choice option only for a specific subset of families.
On the housing side, home values in Wildwood's zip code sit below both the Florida statewide median and the national median, and values have slipped slightly year over year. Rents, by contrast, have edged up modestly. The estimated monthly carrying cost of a typical home here is meaningfully lower than what buyers face in much of Florida, which may matter to families weighing a move into the area. Rent-to-income ratios are within a reasonable range at current asking rents.
Detailed information about specific programs, course offerings, staffing, or attendance patterns at Wildwood Intermediate was not available in this data. The locale brief for Wildwood returned no usable information about the community's character, employers, or walkability, so that context cannot be filled in here rather than guessed at. Families considering this school would benefit from a direct visit to get a feel for the building environment and to ask about the academic supports available across the grade span, particularly in fifth-grade math where the proficiency gap is widest.
See more original research from School Decision →