PBC graduation rates inching higher

Graduation rates across Palm Beach County are creeping higher than prepandemic levels as statewide figures hit their highest point in history, according to data released Tuesday by the Florida Department of Education.

Across Palm Beach County, 90.5% of seniors graduated from high school in 2023, the data show. That’s a hair higher than the graduation rate of 90.2% in 2019 before the pandemic began, and it’s 1.6 percentage points higher than the 2021-22 school year.

This year’s figure is higher than the statewide average of 88%, which is the highest graduation rate in state history omitting 2020 and 2021, when certain assessment requirements were waived due to the pandemic.

In those years, graduation rates climbed to 90.2% and 91% in Palm Beach County and statewide averages were 90% and 90.1%, the data show.

Overall, 20 of 31 Palm Beach County high schools saw an increase in graduations rates this year. Village Academy, a small, district-run K-12 school in Delray Beach, had a 100% graduation rate among its senior class of fewer than two dozen students.

Most of the 12 schools that lost ground on graduation rates were public high schools, including William T. Dwyer, Lake Worth High, Pahokee Middle-Senior High, Palm Beach Central, Spanish River and Olympic Heights.

Many high school seniors were thrown into turmoil weeks before graduation last year when the state legislature weighed changing the requirements for the substitute test scores students can submit to get a diploma if they don’t pass their state tests in math and reading.

Despite ultimately delaying that change a year, legislators still slightly raised the test scores needed to graduate, leading to uncertainty for more than 2,000 students in Palm Beach County.

Palm Beach County’s high schools have the highest graduation rate of the seven large urban school districts in Florida, followed by Miami-Dade (90.3%), then Orange (89.1%), Broward