Parkway Middle School

Parkway Middle School in Kissimmee, FL, is a mid-sized public school serving 601 students in grades 6-8 within the Osceola district, where it has historically ranked in the bottom 15% of Florida middle schools.

The most striking feature of Parkway is a dramatic split in student performance. Students in advanced, high-school level courses achieve exceptional results, with 100% proficiency in Geometry and 71% in Algebra 1—far exceeding state averages. However, the general student body struggles profoundly on grade-level assessments. For example, only 16% of 8th graders are proficient in science, the lowest score among all nearby schools, and just 32% are proficient in 8th-grade ELA. This suggests a highly effective program for a select group of advanced students while the majority of students are being left behind. In contrast, the nearby Sports Leadership Arts Management (Slam) school, just two miles away, achieves dramatically better results across all subjects with a similar student population, highlighting that a different educational model can succeed in the same neighborhood.

On a positive note, Parkway’s chronic absenteeism rate of 25.2% is significantly lower than that of Kissimmee Middle School (41.6%), indicating that attendance is not the primary driver of low test scores. The school also spends a relatively high $11,700 per student, more than higher-performing schools like Lake Nona Middle ($10,353), raising questions about how funds are allocated. The path to improvement likely lies not in more money or better attendance, but in a fundamental re-evaluation of how core instruction is delivered to the majority of students.