Original Research by School Decision on Deaf High School (fsdb)
Deaf High School at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind sits on a sprawling campus along San Marco Avenue in St. Augustine, a short distance from the city's walkable historic downtown. It is a state-funded, tuition-free public special education high school serving students who are deaf or hard of hearing across grades nine through twelve. It is not a neighborhood school in the conventional sense; families choose it because of what it is purpose-built to do, and the student body is drawn from across Florida rather than from a single zip code.
The school's enrollment is small relative to a typical public high school, and the student body is racially and ethnically mixed, with white, Hispanic, and Black students each making up meaningful shares of enrollment. A large majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the broad geographic and economic range of families who rely on the school. Specific IEP and English learner data were not reported in the records available to us.
The residential dimension is central to the program. Publicly reported information from Florida State University's College of Social Work indicates that roughly two-thirds of FSDB students board on campus during the week, Sunday evening through Friday afternoon, while the remaining third are day students. That arrangement makes the campus infrastructure directly relevant to families in a way that is unusual for a school review: housing quality, dormitory conditions, and on-campus support systems shape the daily experience as much as the academic program itself.
On that front, the state legislature's recent capital investment is worth noting. The 2025 Florida Legislature appropriated a notably large sum for FSDB, with publicly reported descriptions framing it as an unusually substantial state capital commitment to modernize campus facilities. Ongoing multi-year renovation work, including a recently funded dormitory renovation and recurring maintenance line items in successive state budgets, reflects a sustained investment by Tallahassee in the physical campus. For a family weighing a residential placement, this is material context.
Academic performance data in the standard format, such as state proficiency rates and four-year graduation figures, were not reported for this school in the records we reviewed. The comparison fact-set for districts in St. Johns County returned no applicable metrics for this school. That is expected for a school like this one: the standard accountability measures Florida applies to typical high schools are structured around a general education population, and a specialized school serving deaf and hard-of-hearing students operates outside that frame in ways that make direct comparison uninformative. A parent who wants to understand academic outcomes, communication access, Deaf education philosophy, ASL and spoken-language pathways, and post-secondary placement should direct those questions to the school directly.
St. Augustine itself provides a particular setting for a boarding school. The city is among the oldest in the country, and publicly reported sources describe it as a coastal city with a well-developed historic district, a walkable downtown core, a strong arts and creative-worker presence, and a population that skews older and is highly educated by Florida standards. Northrop Grumman, Flagler Health+, Flagler College, and FSDB itself are among the area's major employers. St. Johns County as a whole is growing rapidly, with significant residential and infrastructure development underway, and the county's housing market has remained well above state and national medians, though values have eased modestly over the past year. For families of boarding students, the local housing market is largely background context; for day-student families commuting from within the county, it is more directly relevant.
The school operates under the DEAF/BLIND district in Florida's system, a designation that reflects its statewide special-purpose structure rather than a local tax district. Its mission is specific, its population is specific, and the questions a parent needs to ask are correspondingly specific to Deaf education, residential programming, and individual student communication needs.
See more original research from School Decision →