News Headlines

Source: Herald-News, Hardinsburg, Dec. 11, 2008

Cloverport school cited by U.S. News & World Report

By Staff report

The Cloverport Independent School District has received yet another honor, being one of 33 Kentucky public high schools named to U.S. News & World Report’s 2009 Best High Schools Search. The list appears in the magazine’s issue dated Dec. 15-22, 2008.

This is the second year that U.S. News & World Report, in collaboration with School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education and data research business run by Standard & Poors, analyzed academic and enrollment data from more than 21,000 public high schools across the country.

The methodology developed by SES is based on two key principles: (1) a great high school must serve all its students well, not just those who are college-bound; and (2) a high school must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show that it is successfully educating its students across a range of performance indicators.

A three-step process determined the best high schools. The first two steps ensured that the schools serve their students well, using state proficiency standards as the measuring benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first two steps, a third step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work.

The top schools were placed into four categories: gold (the top 100 schools nationally based on the College Readiness Index); silver (College Readiness Index of at least 20 but not ranked in the top 100 nationally); bronze (do not offer Advanced Placement [AP] or International Baccalaureate [IP] or do not achieve a College Readiness Index of at least 20 but successfully meet the other two key performance indicator criteria); and honorable mention (achieved very high levels of college readiness but only partially met state test performance criteria).

FFHS received the bronze designation. According to the data, the school has a disadvantaged student enrollment of 53.8 percent and a 3.8 percent minority enrollment.

Superintendent Dr. John Millay told The Herald-News, “We are very proud to have earned this national distinction as one of America’s Best High Schools for 2009. The entire staff, student body, parents, board members, and community are to be commended for their relentless efforts to improve the quality of education in Cloverport.