For the third straight year, San Benito High School has made the Best High Schools rankings by U.S. News & World Report.
“It’s a great story of consistency and student achievement,” SBHS Principal Adrian Ramirez said. “To be recognized constantly over this three-year period is very validating with a school for our size.”
U.S. News & World Report ranked SBHS 644th in California and 4,281 out of 17,587 schools nationally. Its ranking methodology is determined by weighing scores across six indicators of school quality, including college readiness (30%), math and reading proficiency (20%), math and reading performance (20%), underserved student performance (10%) graduation rate (10%) and college curriculum breadth (10%), which measures the percentage of a school’s seniors who took and earned qualifying scores on multiple AP or IB exams.
“It just so happens that a lot of our initiatives and how we allocate our resources and our efforts happen to be aligned with a lot of the metrics U.S. News uses,” Ramirez said. “When we looked into the criteria, it happened to be aligned with our own initiatives and focus.”
According to a district press release, SBHS has been named an Honor Roll School by the Educational Results Partnership for the last three years, was designated an Advanced Placement District Honor Roll School in 2020, was awarded a full, six-year accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and has been recognized by the Special Olympics as a Unified Champion School for four consecutive years.
Ramirez credited the SBHS teachers, staff members and students for playing critical roles in allowing the school to reach for a high level and attain its goals, especially in the past year dealing with Covid. Ramirez emphasized teachers and staff have done a lot of work behind the scenes for SBHS to hit its target goals.
“It’s a collective resilience,” he said. “The narrative of the term used loosely right now (in education circles) is learning loss. Maybe there has been less content delivered to the students, but as far as learning is concerned, I think my kids learned a lot this past year, more than I can say I ever learned in working through barriers. And despite some of the disadvantages that many students and their families have, they were able to come out of it. … Fortunately, we focus on equitable access to make sure resources are allocated based on the needs of each student.”
