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Settle in or bookmark this story – it’s a long one. We’ve worked on this one for about eight months, and there is a lot of information here.
The BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): Okaloosa County’s standardized test scores have suffered a 10-point decline over the last 20 years.
But Okaloosa County isn’t alone in this decline. Sixty-five of Florida’s 67 school districts have suffered a decline in test scores over the last two decades.
Well – One of the two that got better is Walton County.
So we looked deeply at the data and found a big reason for their success. Here’s what we found:
At the end of every school day, Mossy Head School Principal Leslie Hulion still has plenty to do. Whether it’s progress reports for struggling kids or meeting with teachers to ensure they feel supported in their work – she doesn’t exactly have a ton of free time when the final bell rings.
Hulion worked her way up the ladder from teacher to principal. Still, she hops into a beat-up old surplus minivan and chauffeurs children home on the long dirt roads of north Walton County after-school tutoring she helped organize multiple times per week.
“That gave us an extra opportunity to give our students the extra support they need. To provide that extra support and instruction they need,” Hulion said, “To get to see where they live and work on those extra relationship pieces.”
The after-school drop-off program is her brainchild – and uses vans that were on their way to the county school district’s auction block before she got them for this program that allows students to get extra help with their studies without burdening parents with additional logistics challenges.
“That was the largest group of students we needed to be here,” Hulion said of the students who couldn’t stay after the regular day ended to get extra help because of their parents’ work schedules, “They need to get that tutoring; they need to get that extra support.”
The program has significant benefits for the kids. The bus runs three routes after school each day to get the students who need extra help but don’t have a way to get home afterward.
It has the added benefit of ensuring extra face-to-face time between the leaders of the schools and the students who need their help the most.
Hulion said, “It gave us an opportunity to have some extra time with them, too, on the road home. We have conversations that maybe the regular school day doesn’t lend itself to being able to slow down and have those conversations with.”
The casual observer could easily write off Mossy Head School and its students as a lost cause. Six of every seven children at the school received free and reduced lunch, a commonly used marker by education policy analysts for childhood poverty and food instability. High free and reduced lunch numbers are an almost surefire way for a school to find itself with students who perform poorly on state standardized testing and a poor letter grade from the Florida Department of Education.
In short, you could write off the kids at Mossy Head School and say that their parents’ incomes and where they are from have determined their test performance.
But something unexpected happened.
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Mid Bay News’ linear regression analysis that included all public schools in the western Florida Panhandle found strong relationships between a school’s number of students on free and reduced lunch – and the school’s academic performance. The correlation for these two variables was lowest among elementary schools and highest among middle schools, where statisticians would consider the correlation ‘weak.’ By those same rules, the correlation between the two variables for high schools was ‘strong,’ and middle schools were ‘very strong.’ The correlation between two variables can vary in strength. Still, the numbers don’t lie – there is a connection between how many children are on free and reduced lunch and their academic performance.
Based on analysis using linear regression to compare all schools in the panhandle to the west of Tallahassee to one another – Mossy Head School should be a ‘C’ school. Instead, it’s earned an ‘A’ rating on the Florida Department of Education’s public school ratings for years.
The predicted grades that we calculated using Western Panhandle free and reduced lunch info and school test score results – instead of its students earning a 53% pass rate – fully 64% of students passed, which is good enough for an A from the Florida DOE – by two points – for an elementary school. You can see the grades for your kid’s school here.
It’s not just Mossy Head School that has overperformed; it’s countywide in Walton Schools. Twelve of Walton County School District’s fourteen (86%) elementary, middle, high, and combined schools outperformed where free and reduced lunch data would expect them to be.
Okaloosa County, which has a median household income similar to Walton County, saw 20 of its 37 (54%) schools with reporting data outperform their expectations based on relative poverty levels.
Walton County Superintendent of Schools Russell Hughes’ election to the job eight years ago, in a close race where he won 53% of the vote, tracks with the rapid rise of Walton County’s test scores.
The year before Hughes took office, in 2015, Walton sat in 31st place for test score results in the state of Florida. 59% of students in Walton County who took standardized tests in 2015 passed. 2024’s data shows an increase to 70% of students passing their standardized tests. In 2023, three-quarters passed.
“I have high expectations without excuse,” says Walton Superintendent Russell Hughes, “Ethnicity is not a learning exceptionality. It impacts culture and it impacts people, but it’s not a learning disability. Being poor is not a learning disability. It gives you limited access to learning. Because, perhaps, when parents who have money can buy books – those [other] parents are buying things that they have to survive off of. So, we understand that those students like that are coming to us. And what we do, every day, we make sure children have a place to go. We make sure children are loved. We make sure that they have what they need educationally. We want to change ,again, we want to change the generation. We want to change the culture. We want to change the mindset. We want people to understand that if they land in Walton County, regardless of where they are, who they are, what they look like, what exceptionality they have, they are going to learn.”
What makes the increase all the more impressive is the slow decline of almost every other school district in the state on standardized testing over the last 20 years.
Only two school districts in the state have shown improvement in state testing since the early aughts. The first is Tiny Lafayette County (a total of 1,133 students), which has a single elementary and high school. Walton County is the other.
Most districts, including Okaloosa and Santa Rosa County, saw their test scores decline over the last two decades. Although Santa Rosa County’s test scores have recently buoyed, Okaloosa County has seen its proportion of students passing their standardized test scores drop ten percentage points from 2004 to 2024. Okaloosa County held onto its ‘A’ rating from the Florida Department of Education by a single point in 2024. schools that get less than 63% of the allocated points on the state’s testing matrix are considered ‘B’ districts.
We attempted to contact the Florida Department of Education, which oversees all of Florida’s more than 4,400 public schools, to ask them about the tests, test scores, and why they seem to have dropped – even as a higher percentage of students have earned their high school diplomas over the last 20 years – but we haven’t yet received an answer. We’ll update the story should they respond.
We sent multiple interview requests to the local teachers’ union about this subject.
While we were initially hopeful they would come out of their shells because we finally got a response from them, they went radio silent on us.
So we thought it’d be a dead end for us until a representative for the union showed up and spoke to local lawmakers about their needs at December 2024’s legislative delegation meeting in Crestview.
The representative for the Okaloosa County Education Association at the meeting, Crestview teacher Michael Dingus, didn’t want to talk to Mid Bay News, but he did tell the delegation about the district’s need for more educators.
“Teacher shortages persist. Our teachers remain number 50 in the nation on average pay – and many of our teachers and education staff professionals are forced to work multiple jobs to simply provide for their families,” said OCEA representative Michael Dingus, “Investing $1,000 more per student each year will ensure that students have access to a world-class public education and simultaneously move Florida teacher salary ranges from the bottom to the top ten.”
The story is a little different in the Niceville/Valparaiso area, where the Okaloosa County School have, for the most part, outperformed their poverty level and kept higher grades than the rest of the county.
Three of the seven Okaloosa public, non-charter schools in the Niceville, Eglin, Valparaiso, and Bluewater Bay areas overperformed their expectations based on free and reduced lunch (Lewis, Plew, and Ruckel). Two were even with their predicted score (Niceville and Edge) and two were below expectations based on the data (Eglin and Bluewater Elementary). The two charter schools, STEMM and Collegiate, which are set up to teach high-performing students from across the county, far exceeded their predicted values based on the number of students receiving free and reduced lunch.
Pay Matters…
Every morning during the school year, Ashley Peeler hops into her car and makes the drive from her home in Niceville to her teacher’s assistant job at the Mossy Head School, the school we visited in the beginning of the story, in Walton County’s rural north end.
Peeler has worked in education her whole adult life. She credits her dad’s hard work and dedication for her inspiration to enter teaching.
“As much as he tried to deter me [from entering the teaching profession] I just said, ‘you know what,’ this is where my heart is. I love being with kids,” Peeler said.
Peeler’s dad’s example is part of the reason she drives one of the most dangerous roads in the state for motor vehicle accidents to help make the classroom a better place to be.
The other reason is the cold-hard cash. Walton County pays its teachers significantly more to teach students there than Okaloosa County School District does.
Instructional personnel start out at about $5,000 more per year in pay, just to cross the county line.
“That was a huge decision-maker [for me],” Peeler added, “teaching isn’t as high-paying [a profession] right now. That’s definitely one thing I tell students that are coming out of the college and univerities when they are graduating.”
As they increase in experience, the gap between Okaloosa and Walton teachers also increases. By the fifteen-year mark in their career, Walton County teachers will make roughly $9,000 per year more compared to someone with the same level of education and experience in Okaloosa County.
Teachers who teach at any accredited school in Florida can transfer and keep their seniority, meaning that a teacher can hop from one district to another that pays higher – and not lose their experiential-based pay.
But the extra cash in Walton’s teacher’s pockets didn’t arrive magically, and it hasn’t always been this way. One of the first things Superintendent Hughes did when he won the election as Walton County School District superintendent was to ask for significant pay hikes for teachers in the classroom – a burden that the district’s taxpayers had to and continue to, absorb.
“We’ve had a 97% increase in pay, to include bonuses since I started in 2016. 101% increase for our TSPs, Teacher Support Personnel, since 2016,” Hughes said.
But the results have spoken for themselves.
“We were number 35 in the State of Florida when I started. And I said, ‘we are going to be number one.’ [I] Said that from day one. We cut it to number 17 in one year.”
Hughes’ executive team was onboarded at district headquarters after the election and dove into creating a plan to attack the problems at the lowest-performing schools. They started with Maude Saunders Elementary and developed a 90-day turnaround plan. In the first year, Maude Saunders had the most significant increase in testing in categories where they had historically struggled.
In a state with more than 5,000 teaching vacancies, rated at the bottom of the barrel for attractiveness for teachers by the Learning Policy Institute – Walton County Started the year with no teaching vacancies at any of the county’s schools.
“Every year, when we go into negotiations, I talk to my [school] board in executive session and I say, ‘we’re doing well. But, we gotta do is pay people – because I am working them hard,'” Hughes said, “So when I talk to our board, and say, ‘listen, these people are working hard, because I am working them that hard. And we’re getting results. The board says, ‘ok, pay them. Compensate them.’ And they work harder. They understand that we are not giving anything away. But, with this comes high expectations.”
…So Does Affordable Housing in Okaloosa County
While Ashley Peeler has a home and can afford to live in Niceville, many other teachers in the area have effectively been priced out by two factors that appear the same, but have some differences: the lack of middle-tier housing and the shortage of places to build more.
Niceville High School Principal Charlie Morello describes himself as the mayor of Niceville High School. It’s a perfect analogy – he has purview over everything from student academic success and discipline to keep the buildings, sidewalks, parking lots, and athletic fields in good order. It also means that the latest Okaloosa County School District Principal of the Year is in charge of recruiting and retaining teachers to educate the classrooms teeming with teens who want to use the education they get here to move on to the beginning of their adult lives with success.
But Morello has a significant housing problem – just like most hiring managers in Okaloosa County. “Past ensuring the safety of your students, faculty and staff – the most important thing a principal does is choose who you hire to bring into the building. That’s a process you put a lot of work into. Then you find these amazing candidates and you want them to be a part of what we do here at Niceville High School. There have been challenges when it comes to folks who aren’t from the local area who maybe aren’t familiar with the cost of living in Niceville – in particular the housing market.” Just a couple of years ago, Marello remembers, he wanted to hire a teacher-coach whom he said showed great promise to make a serious positive difference in the lives of students at the school. But when the candidate, who was from Georgia, took a look at the pay and the cost of living in Niceville he declined the job. “It’s a little deflating, because I want the best of the very best for students at Niceville High School. And when I feel like we’ve encountered a candidate who will meet that mark, and do great things for us – and know it’s a situation beyond my control – I mean, I can give you a great teaching line and the best-looking room in the school and the planning period that you need. But, the ancillary factor of ‘you can’t afford to live in this town,’ and me not being able to do anything about that – and potentially not being able to hire a really great person because of that is really, really frustrating.”
RELATED: Could This Move Spell the Beginning of the End of the Okaloosa Housing Crisis?
Niceville High School alum, entrepreneur, and developer Paul Sjoberg has encountered this issue from both angles. He says one of the solvable problems stakeholders in the Okaloosa County School District need to work together is the provision of what he calls middle-tier housing for teachers – as well as other skilled professionals communities rely on – like nurses, police officers, and firefighters. That way, teachers are more incentivized to teach in Okaloosa schools. They can afford to live where they work and take ownership of the community surrounding their work and job site from the outset.
“Niceville doesn’t have a lot of small square-footage property for people to start their lives in, and it’s just been that way historically. The builders build single-family homes because there was a demand for them, and no one thought too far ahead about building smaller square-footage stuff.”
He adds that the combination of an overabundance of expensive single-family homes, ‘luxury’ one-bedroom apartments that rent for $1,800 per month, and a paucity of single-bedroom, $1100-or-so apartments for new teachers, rookie cops, and firefighters will hurt the city long term because young people entering the workforce will move somewhere else, establish themselves there and never leave.
“I think nurses and teachers who are just coming out of college should have an opportunity to live in the neighborhood and the city they work in,” Sjoberg said, “If you have to compare where they would want to live and what schools they would want to work in, I think Walton County is on the uptick because the housing there is more affordable.”
While Sjoberg continues to work on the problem, a couple of middle-tier housing units at a time, the issue continues to fester. It may require even more investment from people like Sjoberg to make a difference in affordable housing needs in the Niceville area.
The Okaloosa County Commission and the Niceville City Council have proposed projects with Eglin Air Force base to buy up orphaned parcels that have been cut off by road projects like Spence Parkway and use them to build more varied housing stock. Valparaiso’s City Commission has also brought up the possibility of purchasing land from the Air Force near the city cemetery and selling it to developers to build more housing.
While certain schools, like the elementary, middle and high schools in Niceville, seem to be more insulated from drops in test scores, they still have seen slight decreases over the last decade and a half. That follows the general pattern of all school districts throughout the state’s 67 counties.
For almost a decade, Niceville-area realtor Cindy Zimmermann has helped people buy and sell houses in Okaloosa County. She’s a woman of many talents – she earned a degree in engineering, owned and operated a local preschool, and raised five kids who graduated from Okaloosa County School District Schools.
We showed her the data set that reveals the decline of school district test scores – and Okaloosa’s in particular – to ask what happens when schools drop letter grades on state tests regarding the real estate market.
“It makes you concerned about what is happening in the school system. And, you have to wonder why that is happening,” Zimmermann said, “If it continues to go down, you are going to start seeing that affecting, I do believe, the real estate market and people coming to certain cities. If you are in the military and you are moving here, assuming you can afford wherever you want, you have choices on where you want to move, and people are looking those things up. And if it is that downward trend, continues, then you are going to see people choose not to live in these areas unless they absolutely have to.”
She’s recently become an advocate for the deep data sets that come from homes.com – especially their tools concerning local schools. She believes the investment a multibillion-dollar company like homes.com has made in the tools – and making them available to the public – tells you all you need to know about the continued importance of standardized test scores and overall school performance on the real estate market. “It tells you that they believe that schools and school ratings is very important to people when they are considering a move to an area.”
Her analysis of the situation – it could be a problem shortly – but it isn’t one just yet for the real estate market. “If you continue to see them go down, I think that will happen. But, it does beg the question – ‘why are our scores decreasing? Why are Walton’s going up?’ If they can do things to improve, what are we not doing that they are doing? And I think that if it continues, people will start talking.“ Zimmermann added that poor test scores tend to lead to bad reviews on school grades websites. “And we all know what bad reviews do to a business.”
