The top reported proficiency rate is 50% in Math. The lowest is 30% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Blind Pk-8 School (fsdb)
The Blind PK-8 School at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind is a state-operated special education school in St. Augustine, serving students with visual impairment from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. It is part of a residential campus on North San Marco Avenue, and it is unlike any neighborhood school a parent would encounter through a typical school search. Enrollment is very small, which is by design: the school draws eligible students from across Florida, not from a local attendance zone, and the state funds it entirely, meaning families pay no tuition.
The school's mission shapes everything about how to read the available data. Most of the grade-level state assessment results are suppressed, which is standard practice when group sizes are too small to report publicly without identifying individual students. A handful of results from one tested grade were reported, showing a range from roughly half of students reaching proficiency in math to less than a third in reading at that grade level. Those numbers come from a very small cohort and carry wide uncertainty, so a parent should not read them as a reliable performance signal in the way they might at a larger school. Florida's state testing framework was not designed to evaluate schools of this kind, and the suppression and limited reporting here reflect the school's size and population, not an absence of academic rigor.
Against the two districts in St. Johns County, this school's combined proficiency index sits above the midpoint of that comparison set. That is worth noting, but again the small number of reported data points means the figure should be held lightly.
What matters more to most families considering FSDB is the residential model and the campus itself. Publicly reported information indicates that roughly two-thirds of students board on campus Sunday evening through Friday afternoon, while the remainder commute as day students. The campus spans about 80 acres. State legislators have made a sustained multi-year commitment to upgrading it: recent capital budgets have funded a dormitory hall renovation, general maintenance and modernization projects, and the 2025 Legislature approved a particularly large capital appropriation for the campus, signaling continued investment in the physical infrastructure that residential students depend on.
A little over half of enrolled students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is racially and ethnically mixed, with white students forming the largest group, followed by Black and Hispanic students, and smaller numbers of Asian and multiracial students. IEP and English learner counts were not available in the data provided.
St. Augustine itself is a coastal city with a compact, walkable historic downtown, a strong tourism economy, and an older median population. Northrop Grumman is the largest private employer in the area, and healthcare and education are also major employers, the latter including Flagler College and FSDB itself. Housing values in the zip code are close to the state and national averages, and rents have been nearly flat recently. The county is one of the fastest-growing in the country, with active residential construction and an ongoing redesign of the King Street downtown corridor.
For a family weighing FSDB, the core questions are not about test scores or neighborhood housing. They are about whether the residential model fits their child's situation, what the transition between home and campus looks like across the school week, and what specialized services and adaptive curriculum the school provides for students with visual impairment. A parent would want to ask the school directly about its individual programming, assistive technology resources, and orientation and mobility instruction, since those are the dimensions that will define a student's experience here. The data available here does not speak to those specifics.
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