Westside High School

Westside High School in Jacksonville, FL, is a large traditional public high school serving 1,533 students in grades 9-12 within the Duval County Public School District, an area where the district itself ranks in the bottom third of Florida. The school has a long-standing history of low performance, consistently earning a 1-star rating from SchoolDigger for the past decade, and currently ranks in the 20th percentile statewide. Over half of its students (52.6%) qualify for free or reduced lunch, indicating a predominantly low-income population.

The most alarming metric for Westside is its catastrophically high chronic absenteeism rate of 64.5% in the 2023-2024 school year—more than double the state average and significantly higher than the Duval district average. This is a stark contrast to high-performing neighbors like Paxon School/Advanced Studies (20.9% absenteeism) and Oakleaf High School (30.6%). Academic proficiency is also critically low, with only 25% of 9th graders and 30% of 10th graders proficient in English Language Arts—roughly half the state average. While nearby schools like Riverside High School and Frank H. Peterson Academies also lag behind the state, Westside's scores are the lowest among comparable traditional high schools in the area.

Despite these challenges, Westside shows a glimmer of hope with a rapidly improving graduation rate, climbing from 79.2% in 2021-2022 to 93.8% in 2024-2025—now exceeding the state average. This creates a paradox: the school is successfully graduating students but struggling to ensure they master grade-level academic content. There is also a positive trend in math, with Algebra 1 proficiency nearly doubling from 18% to 37% in recent years, though still far below the state average. Notably, Westside's per-student spending ($9,314) is in line with other traditional high schools in the area, suggesting its challenges are more tied to socio-economic factors like high poverty and absenteeism than to a lack of funding.