Osceola schools just posted their best report card

The 2025-26 Florida school grades came out July 1, and the School District of Osceola County posted the best report card in its history. The district grade is a B, but the story is the margin: per the district’s announcement, it missed an A by one-tenth of one percentage point. The Osceola News-Gazette put the count at 773 points earned against the 774 needed. Countywide, 26 schools earned an A, 23 a B, 24 a C, and the only D or F schools in the county serve none of the areas this publication covers.

Inside this corridor, the grades run strong. Every middle school in the coverage area is an A: St. Cloud Middle, Neptune Middle, Harmony Middle, and Narcoossee Middle. Most of St. Cloud’s elementaries climbed to an A this year, with Lakeview Elementary and the BridgePrep charter each jumping two letter grades from C. Harmony Community School held its A at 75% of possible points. And the standout is in Sunbridge: Voyager K-8 scored 78%, the highest mark of any Osceola traditional school in this coverage area, per the Florida Department of Education’s per-school grades file. That beats every Lake Nona school except Laureate Park Elementary, which posted 83% in Orange County’s A-rated district. I have said for a while that Sunbridge families were not trading schools away to get new construction. The state’s own data now says the same thing.

Two grades went the other way, and I would rather say that clearly here than have you find it after a contract is signed. St. Cloud High dropped from B to C, finishing at 59% of points, exactly one point below the B cutoff. Harmony High dropped from A to B at 62%. Cross Prairie K-8, in its first graded year serving the Crossprairie area, opened with a C at 57%, three points below the B line. One-point misses and first-year grades are thin margins, not verdicts, but they are the official record until next July.

One mechanic worth knowing before you compare grades next summer: because more than 75% of Florida schools earned an A or B this year, state law automatically raises the grading scale for 2026-27. The high school A cutoff moves from 65% to 70%. Tohopekaliga High earned its A this year at exactly 65.0%, so identical performance next year would grade as a B, and Harmony High’s 62% would grade as a C. A school whose letter drops in July 2027 has not necessarily gotten worse. Remember that when the 2027 headlines land.

Two caveats, in my voice rather than a lawyer’s. These grades are as released July 1, before any appeals. And attendance zones move: a school named for an area does not guarantee a specific address is zoned to it, so verify zoning for any property through the district’s lookup tools before you fall in love with a house.

The same district wants about $200 a year from you

Now hold that report card next to what happened Monday. Superintendent Dr. Mark Shanoff presented county commissioners with the district’s plan to put a new property tax on the Nov. 3, 2026 ballot, per Positively Osceola. The technical term is one mill, which is tax-speak for $1 on every $1,000 of your home’s taxable value. Taxable value is the after-exemptions number on your tax bill, not what your home would sell for, so it runs meaningfully lower than market price. The district’s own example: a home with $200,000 in taxable value pays about $200 a year, roughly $16.67 a month.

The tax would run four years, starting with the 2027-28 school year, then come back to voters for renewal. The money is for operations, not buildings: teacher and staff pay, campus safety personnel, and academic, arts, and athletic programs, shared proportionately with charter schools by enrollment, with an independent citizen committee watching the spending.

The ballot math gets interesting. This question lands beside the homestead exemption amendment Field Notes covered in Vols. 12 and 13, the one that cuts the non-school portion of property taxes and leaves school taxes untouched. On Nov. 3, an Osceola voter decides whether to shrink one line of the tax bill and add another, on the same piece of paper. The district’s pitch now comes with a fresh best-ever report card attached. Whether voters read that as proof the money is working or proof it is not needed will decide this thing.

St. Cloud can now treat major heart attacks

Orlando Health St. Cloud Hospital announced this week it has launched a 24/7 STEMI program, meaning the most severe type of heart attack, the kind where a coronary artery is fully blocked, can now be treated in town at any hour in the hospital’s new cardiac catheterization lab. Positively Osceola and the Osceola News-Gazette both carried the announcement.

Until now, a St. Cloud patient needing that catheter procedure was transported to a certified facility in Orlando. Dr. Prakrut Patel, the hospital’s interventional cardiologist, told ClickOrlando in January the ride can run up to 90 minutes, and the American Heart Association’s guidance calls for treatment to begin within 90 minutes of arrival. The ride used to eat the entire window. Now the ride is gone.

The hardware is the hospital’s $32 million, 20,000-square-foot expansion completed in January, per the Osceola News-Gazette: two cath labs on the first floor, a 10-bed intensive care unit above them, and 18 emergency treatment rooms that came online earlier this year. Vol. 8 flagged an MRI suite at this hospital in May, and Vol. 15 covered Orlando Health’s filing for an entirely new 480,000-square-foot hospital on the Tupperware corridor. The medical anchors here are compounding. Patel put the demand plainly in January, telling ClickOrlando “we see one person having a major heart attack every other night.”

The veto list lands, and the answer is no

Closing a loop from last week. Vol. 16 reported St. Cloud’s $500,000 Hopkins Park ask was vetoed and its second request, $116,270 for a lightning-detection upgrade, was unconfirmed at press time. Confirmed: the governor’s official veto list shows line 1858A-31, the St. Cloud Safety Alerting System for Local Parks, $116,270, vetoed. The budget was signed June 29. Both St. Cloud asks are dead, $616,270 combined.

The school district took its own hits on the same list: a $1 million Environmental Center boardwalk, a $1 million high school aquatic center, and $750,000 for a security operations center, all cut, alongside the county’s $1.25 million Waterlin Boulevard interchange request. Per State Sen. Kristen Arrington via Positively Osceola, $8.8 million in Osceola projects survived. Read the whole issue as one story: the district that just posted its best grades and lost its state asks is going straight to its own voters.

What to watch over the next 30 days

The school board’s formal steps to place the tax question, and the first organized support or opposition now that the grades give both sides a talking point. Any appeals that move a corridor school’s grade from the July 1 release. And St. Cloud Fire Rescue and Osceola County Fire Rescue updating triage protocols to route heart attack patients to St. Cloud instead of Orlando.

Chad