Summary
Oceanway School in Jacksonville, FL, serves 828 students in grades 6-8 and is part of the Duval district, which ranks in the bottom third of Florida districts. The school has a moderate level of economic disadvantage, with 47.34% of students eligible for free or reduced lunch, but its overall performance has been low, consistently ranking in the bottom 30% of Florida middle schools over the past decade.
Oceanway School presents a complex academic profile. On one hand, it achieves exceptional results in advanced courses: in the 2025-2026 school year, proficiency in Biology 1 was 94% and in Geometry was 91%, far exceeding district and state averages. However, this success masks significant struggles in grade-level subjects. Only 24% of 8th graders were proficient in general science, well below the district average of 43%, and 6th-grade math proficiency dropped from 48% to 28% over two years. This creates a "two-tiered" system where a select group of students excels in advanced coursework while the majority falls behind. In contrast, nearby Springfield Middle School, with a similar economic profile, achieves much higher proficiency in grade-level subjects, such as 61% in 6th-grade math compared to Oceanway's 28%.
The most critical issue facing Oceanway School is its severe and rising chronic absenteeism rate, which reached 45.9% in the 2023-2024 school year—more than double the rate from 2020-2021 and well above the state average of 31.4%. This attendance crisis likely drives the school's overall low performance and the widening gap between accelerated and general student populations. Additionally, Oceanway spends $9,607 per student, which is lower than many nearby schools like Arlington Middle School ($11,263) and Jean Ribault Middle School ($12,483), suggesting the school may have fewer resources to address its challenges.
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