Florida school safety

School districts here are large ones — 73 of them across 4,306 schools, most drawn along county lines. That size changes what this page can show you. A district enters our ranking only if enough of its schools filed records complete enough to score, and in a state of small districts that bar cuts most of them out. Not here: 53 of the 73 can be ranked.

What we can tell you is narrow and, we think, useful. In the 2021-22 federal Civil Rights Data Collection, each school is compared with roughly 1,500 American schools closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grade levels. Among the peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of their incident rate — a deliberately low bar — and ask whether the school's own report clears a quarter of it. Where the records hold up, we publish a safety score. In this state, 2,642 schools have one. The others show no score at all. That is the method working, not a hole in it.

We grade the reporting of 387 schools as doubtful, a D or an E: schools of that size normally report several incidents, sometimes ten or more, and these reported almost none. That is a statement about paperwork, not about children. We do not know what happened inside those buildings. We know the filing does not add up. The state share is 9.0%; nationally it is 11.3%. Read the gap as filing behavior. The comparison is not adjusted for state, and differences between states in this collection are differences in how they report, not in how safe their children are.

A C sits in the middle on purpose. The school reported almost nothing, but it is small enough that a genuine zero is common. Not evidence of safety. Not implausible either.

The districts that rank highest

Santa Rosa ranks safer than 61% of ranked US districts, with 17 of the 38 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. Then Clay, safer than 49% (27 of 48); Lee, safer than 43% (84 of 114); Okaloosa, safer than 33% (35 of 50); and Suwannee, safer than 31% (8 of 11). Those fractions describe each district's own scored set, and nothing beyond it.

Safest ranked cities in Florida

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Florida city with schools

Every Florida school district