Summary:
Zip code 32124 in Daytona Beach, Florida, is home to a single, highly specialized high school: Dept. Of Corrections Educational Program, which serves just 19 students in grades 8 through 12 within the Volusia County school district.
This school is a non-traditional correctional education facility, and its unique environment shapes every metric. The most notable positive is its extremely low chronic absenteeism rate of 11.4%, which is dramatically better than the district average of 34.1% and the state average of 31.4%. However, this is a direct result of the mandatory attendance in a correctional setting, not a measure of student engagement. The school also boasts a very favorable student-teacher ratio of 9.5:1, allowing for intensive, individualized instruction that would be impossible in a larger school. Academically, the Biology 1 End-of-Course exam proficiency rate is just 10%, far below the district (75%) and state (71%) averages. This low performance must be understood in context: the student body is 73.68% economically disadvantaged and faces immense educational and personal challenges due to incarceration.
For parents, it is critical to understand that this school is not comparable to a traditional public high school. Its metrics—attendance, test scores, and demographics—are all heavily influenced by its correctional environment. The school's true effectiveness would be better measured by outcomes like GED attainment or post-release success, not standardized test scores. While the low student-teacher ratio is a resource, it is applied to a population with the most severe academic deficits. In essence, this is a unique educational ecosystem serving a very specific, high-need population, and any direct comparison to standard schools would be misleading.
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