Westside Elementary — Palm Bay, Florida

Westside Elementary, home of the Explorers, is the Brevard Public Schools elementary at 2175 DeGroodt Rd SW in Palm Bay, FL 32908, and it teaches prekindergarten through grade 6 (Westside Elementary website; NCES grade span).

The contact block on the Westside Elementary site gives 2175 DeGroodt Rd SW, Palm Bay, FL 32908, phone (321) 956-5050 and fax (321) 956-5053 (Westside Elementary website). The NCES directory for 2025-2026 agrees on the address and phone, classifies Westside as a regular, open, non-charter public school, and gives State School ID FL-05-2212 with a grade span of PK through 6 (NCES school record). The FLDOE school grades file lists it as school 2212 in district 05 (FLDOE 2025-26 school grades).

NCES places Bayside High School on the same road at 1901 DeGroodt Rd SW, Palm Bay, FL 32908, with 2,122 students in grades 9 to 12 (NCES school search, Bayside High). Attendance zones for both schools are set by Brevard Public Schools, not by street, so a DeGroodt Road address alone does not decide which school a child attends.

Westside Elementary counted 984 students in 2024-2025, with 65.80 full-time-equivalent classroom teachers and 14.95 students per teacher, according to the federal NCES record for the DeGroodt Road school (NCES school record).

At Westside Elementary the older grades are the bigger ones. Sixth grade had 163 students and third grade 149, while kindergarten had 115 (NCES enrollment by grade). Every Westside grade from 3 to 6 had more students than kindergarten on the DeGroodt Road campus, and NCES publishes the counts without any explanation of the pattern.

The 984 count makes Westside larger than Jupiter Elementary on Tupelo Road SW, which NCES lists with 856 students in the same grades (NCES school search, Jupiter Elementary), and roughly 380 students larger than Turner Elementary on Jupiter Boulevard at 600 (NCES Turner record). In the federal search results for Palm Bay, Westside Elementary is listed with 984 students, PK-6 (NCES school search, Westside).

NCES lists 544 boys and 440 girls at Westside Elementary, a gap of 104. The race and ethnicity count was 407 White, 250 Black, 225 Hispanic, 82 multiracial, 14 Asian, 4 American Indian or Alaska Native and 2 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students (NCES enrollment characteristics). Free lunch eligibility covered 403 students and reduced-price lunch 58, for 461 in total, under half of enrollment. The FLDOE school grades file uses its own economically disadvantaged measure and reports 86.5 percent for Westside (FLDOE 2025-26 school grades).

Westside Elementary earned a B for 2025-26 with 461 points from eight components, 58 percent of possible points, and 98 percent of eligible students tested (FLDOE 2025-26 school grades).

Under the state elementary scale, A=62% of points or greater and B runs from 54% to 61% (FLDOE grading scale). Westside Elementary therefore needed four more percentage points (62 minus 58) to move up to an A.

Reading in the early grades is where Westside Elementary leads. Grade 3 English Language Arts achievement was 69, the highest of its eight components, and well above the 54 posted by Sunrise Elementary and the 45 posted by Turner Elementary in the same file (FLDOE component scores; Sunrise row; Turner row). The weak spot is the math growth of the students who started furthest behind: 46 percent of the lowest 25 percent in mathematics made learning gains.

That lowest-quartile measure is written into state law. Section 1008.34, Florida Statutes, counts the percentage of eligible students in the lowest 25 percent in mathematics, identified by prior year performance, who make learning gains on the state math assessments (Section 1008.34, Florida Statutes). At 46, that row was the lowest of the eight Westside Elementary scores for 2025-26.

Westside Elementary was an A school for most of 2002 through 2015, earned its last A in 2019, and has been graded B in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, per the FLDOE grade history (FLDOE grade history).

Eleven straight A grades, 2002 through 2012, are the long run in the Westside Elementary record (FLDOE grade history, older years). The record starts with a C in 1999, so the DeGroodt Road school has been graded by the state for more than a quarter century. The file has no grades for 2020 or 2021.

The 2023 B on the Westside Elementary record was an informational baseline. Florida law set 2022-2023 grades as a baseline and, lacking learning gains data, fixed the scale so the share of each letter matched 2021-2022 (Section 1008.34, Florida Statutes).

Brevard Public Schools as a whole earned a district A in 2024, 2025 and 2026 (FLDOE 2025-26 district grades), so Westside Elementary, a B in each of those years, is one of the southwest Palm Bay campuses graded a step below the district.

The Westside Elementary site lists a Running Club called the Westside Elites, STEM, music and media center programs, Brevard After School, weekly newsletters, a School Advisory Council page and a Military Students and Families page (Westside Elementary website).

Three of the programs carry short descriptions on the Westside Elementary home page. STEM education is the intentional integration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to create a student-centered learning environment, and the Brevard Public Schools Elementary Music classes serve grades PreK through six with emphasis on General Music (Westside Elementary programs).

Military families are also a focus of the district that runs Westside Elementary. Brevard Public Schools announced on December 18, 2024 that the Florida Department of Education had named it a Purple Star District, with 91 Purple Star Schools across the district (Brevard Public Schools announcement). The announcement does not list individual schools, so this page does not say whether Westside Elementary itself carries that school designation.

Westside Elementary is not a Title I school; the FLDOE 2025-26 file marks NO in its Title I column for row 148 (FLDOE 2025-26 school grades). The City of Palm Bay counts eleven public elementary schools in the city, plus three middle schools, three high schools and three charter schools (City of Palm Bay), and enrollment questions for any of them go to Brevard Public Schools rather than the City of Palm Bay.

Sources for this Westside Elementary page were checked on October 12, 2026: the school website, the NCES Common Core of Data and the FLDOE 2025-26 school grades release.