Haverford H. S. Named One of Top 500 Best Schools In Nation

Newsweek’s America’s Best High Schools of 2011 feature ranked  466 out of 500 schools in its list.

For more than 10 years, Newsweek has listed the top public high schools in the country and this year ranked the Havertown high school 466 out of 500 schools.

For schools to be considered, the news magazine sent out a survey to school officials throughout the country requesting certain information from the 2009-2010 academic school year and more than 1,000 schools answered, according to Newsweek. Based on the survey, a top 500 high schools list was created.

Haverford School District officials were more than happy with the ranking the high school received, such as Haverford Township School Superintendent William Keilbaugh. In a Haverford-Havertown Patch email interview, he stated that he was pleased that Newsweek recognized the efforts of the faculty, staff, students and administrators.

“The criteria utilized by Newsweek including graduation rates, percentage going to college, AP (advanced placement) exams, SAT scores, etc., speak volumes for the efforts of all district programs as youngsters come to the high school ready to continue learning, achieving and performing at a very high level,” he wrote.

While the figures Newsweek gave out for Haverford High School can be found in a screen capture accompanying this article, some of the data it presented was:

• Average SAT Score: 1623
• Graduation Rate: 99
• College Bound: 86 percent

Newsweek’s breakdown of its scoring system can be found here.

Haverford High School Dr. Jeffrey Nesbitt thought the data “absolutely” reflected how well the faculty and students are doing.

“Every ranking is based upon the criteria of that newspaper or magazine, but ideally we would like to be on the top lists around the country,” he wrote to Patch in an email interview. “The determining factors for most of these lists that we can control are AP scores and SAT scores. We are constantly striving to increase the number of AP course offerings and the number of students who take AP courses. We are also constantly reviewing our math and English programs to promote success on the SAT’s.” 

Keilbaugh believes the programs put in place at the high school will greatly benefit students next school year.

“Of course, these rankings are based on recent data. We now believe that in some respects our profile will look even stronger next year with our continued best effort,” he wrote.

Haverford High School did not make Newsweek’s top 1,623 public high schools list in 2010. In fact, this is the first time the school made a Newsweek public high schools list in the last five years, according to the data available on the news magazine’s website.