Southwest Middle School — Palm Bay, Florida

Southwest Middle School is at 451 Eldron Blvd. SE, Palm Bay, FL 32909, a Brevard Public Schools campus that serves grades 7 and 8 in southeast Palm Bay.

Call 321-952-5800 for the Southwest Middle office or fax 321-952-5819 (Southwest Middle, Brevard Public Schools). In the NCES directory the Eldron Blvd SE campus is an open, regular district school rather than a charter, carrying NCES School ID 120015002590 and State School ID FL-05-2122 (NCES school detail, Southwest Middle). Despite the name, the 32909 address sits in the SE quadrant of the Palm Bay street grid.

Southwest Middle shares Eldron Boulevard with a charter school: Odyssey Charter School is at 1755 Eldron Blvd SE, and Columbia Elementary on Waco Blvd SE and John F. Turner Senior Elementary on Jupiter Boulevard SE share the 32909 ZIP Code (NCES Palm Bay search, first results page). Sunrise Elementary on Mara Loma Blvd SE and Royal Palm Charter School on Babcock Street NE are in 32909 as well (NCES Palm Bay search, second results page).

Palm Bay's guide for newcomers counts three middle schools in the city, without naming them (Palm Bay new resident guide). In the NCES search for public schools with a Palm Bay address, Southwest Middle is the only district school whose grade span is limited to the middle grades; the Palm Bay elementary schools run through grade 6. Last verified: October 13, 2026, on the Brevard Public Schools website for Southwest Middle.

Classes at Southwest Middle run from 9:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday, per the school page.

The Southwest Middle front office opens at 8:30 a.m. and stays open until 4:45 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 3:30 p.m. on Friday (Southwest Middle hours). The Eldron Blvd office does not release students early after 3:45 p.m. Monday through Thursday or after 2:30 p.m. on Friday, so a family picking up a child early has to arrive before those cutoffs.

Southwest Middle enrolled 997 students in 2024-2025, 522 in grade 7 and 475 in grade 8, with 52 full-time-equivalent classroom teachers, a ratio of 19.17 students per teacher.

NCES draws those Southwest Middle counts from its official 2024-2025 school-level membership data (NCES school detail, Southwest Middle). By gender the Palm Bay campus had 519 boys and 478 girls. The race and ethnicity breakdown lists 420 White, 279 Black, 195 Hispanic, 90 multiracial, 10 Asian, 2 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and 1 American Indian or Alaska Native student.

Southwest Middle carries the Title I flag, and the state puts 93.4 percent of its enrollment in the economically disadvantaged group for 2025-26, in a file that also codes it school type 02, a middle school (state Title I flag, Southwest Middle). The school's own Title 1 menu posts Annual Title I Snapshots, a School-Family Compact and a Parent and Family Engagement Plan (Southwest Middle).

Southwest Middle School received a C when Florida published 2025-26 grades dated September 1, 2026, scoring 55 percent of possible points, two points below the B line for middle schools.

The FLDOE file credits the Eldron Blvd school with 497 points across 9 components, 55 percent of the total, with 97 percent of eligible students tested (state grades file, Southwest row). For middle schools the file's header note draws the lines at 64 percent or more for an A, 57 to 63 percent for a B and 44 to 56 percent for a C (state scale note). The same row shows C grades for 2024 and 2025 too (grade columns, Southwest row).

The strongest Southwest Middle number is middle school acceleration at 77, and the weakest is science achievement at 37 (component columns, Southwest row). Section 1008.34 of the Florida Statutes explains the acceleration row: for schools made up of grades 7 and 8, the grade counts the percentage of eligible students passing high school level end-of-course assessments or earning industry certifications on the CAPE list (Florida Statutes s. 1008.34). At the Eldron Blvd school that measure is the only component above 70.

No: Southwest Middle in Palm Bay earned an A every year from 2002 through 2011, but it has not posted a grade above B since, and it has been a C in every graded year since 2022.

The FLDOE file records B grades for Southwest Middle in 1999, 2000 and 2001, then ten consecutive A grades from 2002 to 2011 (historic grade columns, Southwest row). A B in 2012 was followed by C grades in 2013 and 2014, an informational baseline B in 2015 when Florida changed tests, three more C grades from 2016 to 2018 and a B in 2019.

The state file has no Southwest Middle grade for 2020 or 2021. State law defines a C as satisfactory progress and a B as above average progress (Section 1008.34) (Florida Statutes s. 1008.34), so the Eldron Blvd school needs two more percentage points to return to the B it last held in 2019.

Southwest Middle's 55 percent trails the 2026 scores of the two high schools with Palm Bay addresses, Heritage High at 64 percent and Bayside High at 61 percent, though the middle and high school scales differ.

Heritage High on Malabar Road earned a B with 64 percent (FLDOE row, Heritage High), and Bayside High on Degroodt Road SW earned a B with 61 percent (FLDOE row, Bayside High). The high school scale puts a B at 60 to 64 percent, while the middle school B band is 57 to 63, so the gap is real but not a direct comparison. No attendance-zone claim is made here for any Palm Bay street.

Outside class, Southwest Middle lists a Speech and Debate Club it describes as award-winning, a cheer team whose season notice closes with GO Broncos!, athletics registration through Aktivate, a Purple Star page for military families, CTE Classes and Varsity Tutors under Academics (Southwest Middle programs). The home page gallery calls the Palm Bay campus The Great Southwest.