I.S. 059 Springfield Gardens

Math has nearly doubled since 2019 (28.7% to 40.7%) and ELA has climbed from 27.9% to 48.8%, putting the school on one of the stronger improvement arcs in southeast Queens — though both subjects remain below the district averages of roughly 57% ELA and 54% math. The split by grade is the real headline: 7th and 8th graders are approaching proficiency (49–55% across ELA and math), but 6th-grade math sits at just 17.1%, suggesting a rough transition year that the school has not yet solved. The most recent year shows ELA continuing to rise while math dipped slightly from 44.6% to 40.7%, worth watching but not yet a reversal.

Day-to-day, this school feels like a place where families and teachers are largely aligned — parent-principal trust (91%) and teacher-reported instruction quality (91%, above the district's 88%) are the strongest signals in the data. But underneath that warmth sit two serious concerns: chronic absenteeism is at 57.4% (with Black students at 62.1%), and suspensions jumped from 20 in 2022-23 to 36 in 2023-24, pushing the suspension rate to 9% — roughly ten times the district average of under 1%. Attendance at 88.4% trails the district's 90.9%, which compounds the academic challenge. The combination of high trust and high disruption is unusual and suggests the school's climate work is still catching up to its academic gains.

The student body is 85% Black and 10% Hispanic, with a diversity index of just 32% — one of the less diverse middle schools in the borough. The neighborhood around the school skews older and homeowning (75% own their homes, only 13% of households have children), so this school pulls from a relatively small pool of middle-school-age families in a largely settled community. Economic need is moderate-to-high (66.1 index), and 19% of students have IEPs, meaning a meaningful share of the building needs additional support.

St. Albans is a stable, predominantly Black residential pocket of southeast Queens where homeownership is high and the poverty rate sits at 9.2% — modest for this part of the borough. About a quarter of adults hold a bachelor's degree, and the median home value is just under $600,000, signaling a community of owners who have built equity over decades. Only 13% of households include children, which means the school-age cohort here is thinner than in many other Queens neighborhoods.

There are no subway stations within a 20-minute walk of the school, so families rely on school buses, public buses, or driving for the daily commute.