From Tribune staff reports
TRUSSVILLE — U.S. News and World Report, long known for ranking American colleges and universities, has released the 2024 list of rankings for high schools in each state and nationally. Hewitt-Trussville High School is ranked 8th best in Alabama and was the 6th highest ranked traditional high school.
Hewitt-Trussville High School
The publication ranked HTHS 12th in 2023 and 15th in 2022. While the Huskies have consistently ranked in the publication’s top 20 high schools in Alabama, this is the school’s first top 10 finish since the rankings began about a decade ago.
HTHS Principal Aaron King credited the hard work and dedication to excellence of the HTHS faculty, staff and students.
“Our new #8 ranking is a win for the entire community,” King said. “We rely on the support of our parents, guardians and students as well as the taxpayers of Trussville to do what we do best as educators. Every teacher, counselor, and administrator in Trussville help to play a part in the success of Hewitt-Trussville High School. We are excited to celebrate this waypoint as the we move the school along our upward path.”
The top two spots went to magnet schools in Montgomery and Huntsville where students must qualify for admission. Another magnet school in Montgomery was ranked at No. 9.
Among traditional high schools, Homewood High School was highest ranked in Alabama at No. 3, followed by No. 4 Mountain Brook High School, No. 5 Vestavia Hills High School, No. 6 James Clemens High School, and No. 7 Spain Park High School. Following HTHS at No. 8 and rounding out the top 10 was Bob Jones High School at No. 10.
“A great high school educates all of its students from different social and economic backgrounds, exposing them to challenging coursework on the path to graduation,” the publication stated in the article. “The highest ranked U.S. public schools in U.S. News & World Report’s 2024 rankings are those whose students demonstrated outstanding outcomes above expectations in math, reading and science state assessments, earned qualifying scores on an array of college-level exams, and graduated in high proportions.”
Rankings were reached by summing school’s weighted scores across six indicators of school quality, then computing a single zero to 100 overall score reflective of a school’s performance across these metrics. The overall scores depict how well each school did on a national percentile basis. For example, a school with a score of 60 performed in the 60th percentile among all schools in the rankings. Hewitt-Trussville’s score was 94.57.