After more than 20 years, Duval County school district earns first 'A' grade for 2024-25 school year

ACKSONVILLE, Fla. — After more than 20 years of trying, Duval County schools earned the district’s first countywide “A” grade for student achievement in the 2024-25 school year, state officials announced July 7.

"Duval has gone from 'B' to 'A'", Gov. Ron DeSantis declared during an appearance at Oceanway Elementary School to unveil grade results with Anastasios Kamoutsas, who he picked in June to be the state's education commissioner.


School district administrators had been waiting expectantly for the coveted top grade.

“I want to hang it somewhere and celebrate it,” Superintendent Christopher Bernier said during the School Board’s July 1 meeting, when he said the district’s performance data made him hopeful, but that he couldn’t be sure the district had reached that goal yet.

“We are within percentage points on the other side of the decimal. We’re waiting to see,” Bernier, who finished his first full year in charge of the district last week, told the board.

The top grade reflected incremental changes the district has pursued for years to improve grades at schools across the country’s 18th-largest public school system.

Those changes were credited with cutting the number of schools that received “D” or “F” grades, producing “A”-through-“C” results at all but a few percent of the county’s public, non-charter schools.


Education activists cheered the district’s results.

"We are thrilled to celebrate this important progress for Duval County Public Schools, and we begin by applauding the educators and school leaders working on the frontlines each day to support our students,” Rachael Tutwiler Fortune, president of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund, said in written remarks about the grade.

“Unwavering commitment” by teachers and administrators “is the driving force behind these gains, and it’s their hard work that deserves our deepest gratitude,” she added.

At public meetings during his first year in office, Bernier framed improved grades as an accomplishment that carried economic benefits as well as helping individual students and families. He said business executives considering relocating firms to new areas would consider, among other things, whether they reasonably have existing employees move there, and the quality of schools was a true consideration.


Having "A" schools has been a selling point that realtors in fast-growing St. Johns County have been able to point to each year since the Florida Department of Education began grading school districts for the 2004-04 school year.

Nassau and Clay counties have been able to make the same boast for most of that time, too but Duval County has seemed entrenched in respectable but unexciting "B" grades for most of the past decade.

The marks were even less remarkable before then. During the first 11 district gradings, ending in 2014, Duval schools had six "B" years and five as a "C" district.

A look at Northeast Florida district grades for 2024-2025 school year
Alachua - B
Baker - B
Clay - A
Columbia - B
Duval - A
Flagler - B
Nassau - A
Putnam - C
St. Johns County - A
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