Broward schools keep A rating amid enrollment and closure concerns

Broward County Public Schools held onto its second consecutive A when Florida released 2024-25 school grades, but the district’s top mark came as enrollment kept sliding and officials weighed more school closures, consolidations and boundary changes.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools also remained an A-rated district, reinforcing the two counties’ academic standing even as both systems faced pressure from shrinking student counts. In Broward, the district’s grade breakdown showed 156 schools earned A’s, 88 earned B’s and 34 earned C’s, with no D- or F-rated schools. Florida’s school grading formula considered test achievement, learning gains, graduation rates and acceleration measures.

The numbers behind the grade showed movement inside Broward’s school system. NBC 6 South Florida reported that 28 schools moved from B to A and seven moved from C to A. A later WPLG Local 10 report said 26 schools improved from B to A and 32 improved from C to B. Broward’s memo also said the district tested at least 95% of eligible students for a school grade.

The deeper challenge was enrollment. Broward’s 10th-day count fell from 198,362 students in 2024-25 to 188,002 in 2025-26, a drop of nearly 11,370 students, or about 4.7%. More than 90% of that decline came from district-run schools rather than charter campuses. Miami-Dade also reported about 13,000 fewer students at the start of the 2025-26 school year than the year before, with Superintendent Jose L. Dotres saying the bigger issue was that students were not coming in, not leaving.

Those losses are reshaping the district map. Broward’s Redefining Our Schools process had moved into a second phase by late August 2025, with board members examining 34 schools for repurposing, consolidation or closure, including 16 elementary schools, 15 middle schools and three high schools. District officials said many of those campuses were below 70% capacity, and some were only about 40% full.

Superintendent Howard Hepburn has argued that the A rating validates Broward’s academic work, but the district is still forced to confront a structural squeeze that touches staffing, budgets and which campuses stay open. The grade helped Broward show it can still deliver in the classroom; the enrollment decline made clear that the harder fight is over how many schools the district can keep running.