The State of Florida has released the 2024-2025 Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST) testing results, District grades, and School grades for the State of Florida. The Argus Foundation has fired up its social media informational campaign “Sarasota Schools Data Dig.”

Born in 2021, this campaign, which can be found on our social media channels, Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn, assists the community in understanding how our school district compares to the state average and other districts, and how our schools compare to each other and the state average.

The Argus Foundation takes the data directly from the Florida Department of Education website, which is downloaded in spreadsheets, and we sort them by grades, percentages, and total points, and then highlight the data to make it easier to read and understand. We then screenshot and post the spreadsheet and report on the data point without opinion.

We use one data point spreadsheet per social media post and we post on Mondays and Thursday late afternoons. We began our posts in early July and will be posting data points through at least September.

The news is mostly very good for Sarasota County Schools. We are once again an “A” rated district and ranked as the 7th highest school district in the State of Florida. We are behind Nassau, St. John’s, Walton, LaFayette, Indian River, and Collier County as calculated in total points earned under the State of Florida’s calculation system.

The school comparisons within the county include our charter schools. Sarasota Schools have an incredible 30 schools with an “A” grade, 17 “B” schools, and 6 “C” schools. We have no “D” schools. Out of those “C” schools, 4 are charter schools and only 2 are traditional public schools. These are incredible grades.

In the critical data point of 3rd grade English Language Arts, we have 23 schools testing better than the state average, one at the state average, and 9 schools below the state average. You can see the specific county schools on this data point post so you know where your own neighborhood school ranks.

Our District is going to have to really focus on math, specifically 8th grade FAST testing results. Our district ranks 32 out of 67 counties for this data point. We have only 6 schools testing higher than the state average, with 15 testing below the state average.

Historically, the achievement gap between White students and Minority students has been worse than the state gap, this trend has continued this year. In grades 3-10, the English Language Arts gap between White and African American students is 6 points worse than the state, and 4 points worse than the state when comparing White and Hispanic Students.

In grades 3-8 the Math gap is even worse, with the gap in Sarasota Schools being 8 points worse than the state gap when comparing White students and African American students. It is 6 points worse when comparing White students and Hispanic students.

The Argus Foundation is providing this educational social media campaign as a service to our community, so you know how Sarasota County measures up on education without having to spend hours sorting through spreadsheets. Sarasota County is in a good position and easily could become the top district. We hope to report that very soon. In the meantime, check out our social media for the current data.

Christine Robinson is the Executive Director of The Argus Foundation.