Original Research by School Decision on Suwannee High School
Suwannee High School is the public high school serving grades nine through twelve in Live Oak, the county seat of Suwannee County in North Florida. It draws students from across the county and is part of the Suwannee district, which is the sole district in the county.
The school's enrollment places it in a mid-sized range for a rural Florida high school. The student body is multiracial: white students make up roughly half the enrollment, Hispanic students about a quarter, and Black students close to a fifth, with smaller shares of Asian, multiracial, and other students. That composition reflects the broader demographic mix of Suwannee County's agricultural and small-town communities. A majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, which signals that economic need is a real and widespread feature of the school's context rather than a peripheral one. Data on English learner enrollment and students receiving special education services were not available in the records reviewed.
State assessment results and multi-year academic trend data were not available for Suwannee High School. The comparison fact-set for districts in Suwannee County was not applicable because proficiency index, four-year graduation rate, and chronic absenteeism figures were all missing from the data. A parent wanting to gauge academic performance against state or county benchmarks would need to consult the Florida Department of Education's school grades portal or request results directly from the district, since those figures are not reflected here.
Program and course offering information was not available in the records reviewed, so it is not possible to describe AP access, dual enrollment, career and technical education, or extracurricular pathways from this data alone. That is a meaningful gap for families evaluating academic rigor or post-secondary readiness, and it would be worth asking the school directly about what is offered.
The district brief search returned no confirmed parent-relevant changes, so recent policy or structural shifts at the district level are not described here rather than guessed at.
On the housing side, Suwannee County home values sit well below both the Florida statewide median and the national median, making it one of the more affordable markets in the state by that measure. Values have edged upward over the past year. The price-to-income ratio suggests that owning a home here is relatively accessible compared to much of Florida, which tends to make the county attractive to families priced out of larger metros. Rental cost data was not available in the records reviewed.
Live Oak is a small city in a largely rural county surrounded by timber land, the Suwannee River corridor, and farming operations. The research budget for the locale brief was exhausted before detailed information on walkability, major employers, civic anchors, or growth patterns could be gathered, so those dimensions of community life are not described here.
What a parent can say with confidence from this data: Suwannee High is a regular public high school serving the county's full range of ninth through twelfth graders, with a student body where economic need is the norm rather than the exception, in an affordable housing market that is meaningfully less expensive than the Florida median. The gaps in academic performance data and program information are real, and families considering this school would benefit from a direct conversation with the school and a look at the state's published accountability data to fill in what this record cannot.
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