BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. — Despite the pandemic, a record high 2020 graduation rate was set in Brevard County.​

What You Need To Know

  • Brevard County had a record graduation rate for 2020

  • Seniors graduated with at a 90.3% rate

  • That is an improvement over 2019 without any help from the state

The schools saw improvement from 2019 even without the state's help.

For high school seniors like West Shore's Noah Ogburn, 2020 meant adapted learning like we've never seen before.

"It was tough, finished the year, got through it," Ogburn tells us. "I was even happy, ended up taking a lot of AP tests, and doing quite well with those at the end, and they are hard to pay attention in."

Ogburn finished with a 3.9 GPA and was one of the Brevard County seniors who graduated with a record 90.3 percent graduation rate.

"Hearing that Brevard was that successful is amazing," he said.

"Obviously this past Spring was unprecedented," said Russell Bruhn with Brevard Public Schools.

He said despite the state waiving issuing letter grades to students, it has nothing to do with their usual interpretation of grades.

They say some students succeeded and struggled in the fourth quarter at a rate similar to 2019.

While other districts handled grades in a different way, BPS did not.

"The state waived the grades for the actual schools in the district," Bruhn said. "That didn't impact the students, they were making the grade they were going to make."

The state waived the impact of required algebra standards on a student's graduation status since they missed multiple ACT or SAT test opportunities between mid March and June.

Since those students couldn't take the tests until the end of the year the state waived the requirement for the class of 2020.

"That would have impacted a hundred or so students, so there is a little bit of that," Bruhn added. "But if take that out more than half of our schools over-performed when it comes to graduation rates."

Bruhn said they did the work, had the credits, the scores, the grades and now diplomas.

The district does say there are declines in the percentage of Brevard grads who enrolled in college in the Fall.

The numbers are in line with national averages and likely due to the pandemic.​

Now a college freshman, Noah is taking what he's learned and working to get a degree, then job in the maritime industry.

"I've gotten to experience the ocean and the river, and I want that to transfer to the sea," Ogburn said.