By Pat Lafleur,
FortThomasMatters City Beat
Last Friday
NKY.com
reported the U.S. News & World Report had released its top 10 best
public high schools in the state, ranked for meeting state proficiency
standards and college preparedness goals.
Two NKY
public high schools made KY’s top 10 – Beechwood (6) and Ryle (9) – but Fort
Thomas Independent administrators were surprised last week that there wasn’t a
third NKY high school recognized, as HHS remained absent from the list.
The news
came as a shock to Superintendent Gene
Kirchner and HHS Principal Brian
Robinson because, in 2012, Highlands was ranked 5th overall in
KY. “Our most recent data is consistent with [last year’s] level of
performance,” said Mr. Kirchner in an email over the weekend. “I have come to
the conclusion that there has been a reporting error.”
After
reaching out to US News and World Report, Mr. Kirchner has learned today that
HHS was actually left out of the ranking process entirely. This was due to the
percentage of free and reduced lunch students scoring proficient or above at
HHS being lower than the ranking formulas required for inclusion in those
rankings.
“Quite
frankly, I don’t totally agree with this reasoning,” Mr. Kirchner said. “The
reality is that when looking at overall
performance, Highlands was among the top performing schools” (emphasis added).
That said,
Highlands’s absence from this year’s rankings reveals an important area in
which HHS has continued to struggle: that is, performance by the population of
students who qualify for financial aid due to their economic class and
household income levels (among other criteria).
While the
data for this year’s rankings were pulled from the 2010-11 school year (acc. to
U.S. News and World Report’s communication with Mr. Kirchner), the
Superintendent acknowledges this to be an area that continues to deserve more
attention. “It has been one of our priorities this school year and will be
going forward,” he said, “The information received from US News only serves to
motivate us more.”
