Original Research by School Decision on Livingston Academy
Livingston Academy is the lone public high school in Overton County, serving students in ninth through twelfth grade from Livingston and the surrounding area. The school is a regular public high school, not a charter or magnet, and it enrolls roughly eight hundred and fifty students. The student body is predominantly white, with a small share of Hispanic students and even smaller shares of Black, Asian, and multiracial students. Data on the share of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch was not available, nor was information on the percentage of students with disabilities or English learners. A parent will want to ask the school directly about these support populations.
The town of Livingston is the county seat, a small community in the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland region, roughly a fifteen-mile drive north of Cookeville. It has a traditional courthouse-square downtown, with the Overton County Courthouse as the central landmark, and the local government describes the town as family-oriented. The population has grown modestly since the 2020 census, and the town is part of the Cookeville micropolitan statistical area, which is itself growing. Housing in the area is more affordable than the national median, with typical home values well below the state average. Livingston Regional Hospital, the school system, and local government are among the larger employers. A branch campus of the Tennessee College of Applied Technology and a satellite campus of Volunteer State Community College are present in the town, giving residents access to postsecondary options nearby.
State testing data for Livingston Academy was not available, so there is no public picture of how students perform in math, English, or science. The comparison tool that positions the school relative to districts in Overton County could not generate a proficiency index, a graduation rate, or a chronic absenteeism rate because the underlying values were missing from the data. This means a parent cannot yet gauge academic performance or student outcomes from state-reported measures. The graduation rate was also not available; a high school where this metric is missing leaves a gap in a core measure of student success. A parent evaluating this school will want to ask the district and school administrators for their most recent state assessment results and graduation figures, as the public data does not supply them.
What is clear is that Livingston Academy is a mid-sized high school in a small, growing town where housing is relatively affordable and the community centers on the courthouse square. The school setting is integrated into the town rather than isolated on a separate campus, and the presence of nearby technical and community college campuses suggests some regional infrastructure for career and academic pathways beyond high school. Without test scores or a graduation rate, the academic profile of the school remains opaque, and any evaluation of instruction quality would need to come from direct inquiry with the school. The district itself did not surface any recent major changes or strategic initiatives in public sources.
The school fits a family looking for a regular public high school in a small-town, family-oriented setting with affordable housing and a modest rate of growth. But the lack of academic performance data means the school’s core educational results are not visible from the information available here, and a parent should treat that as a significant open question to resolve before forming a judgment.
See more original research from School Decision →