Serving the High Plains

Tucumcari High School receives Bronze in the 2015 Best High Schools Rankings

Thomas Garcia

QCS Senior Writer

Tucumcari High School received a Bronze Medal award in the U.S. News and World Report’s 2015 Best High Schools Rankings.

Tucumcari was the only school in Quay County to receive a national medal ranking.

“We are very proud to have Tucumcari High School recognized nationally in this report,” said Tucumcari School District Assistant Superintendent Dave Johnson.

Johnson said administrators and teachers at each school in the district have been working hard to improve the quality of education offered to the children. He said with the new school grading system still a work in progress, the district is making adjustments constantly to meet or exceed state standards.

“This is an outstanding achievement for the administration and teachers at Tucumcari High School,” Johnson said.

Tucumcari High School scored greater than the state average in math proficiency and near the state average on reading proficiency and college readiness.

This ranking shows the effort and dedication of the staff and students of Tucumcari high school, said THS Principal Nicole Bright-Leslie.

Bright-Leslie said some of the information collected for the ranking is reflected from their Advanced Placement scores. She said while THS is a smaller school in the state, it has produced good AP scores each year.

AP is a College Board program that offers college-level courses at high schools across the country.

Bright-Leslie said the national recognition will also serve as a great building block for next school year. She said the students and staff are looking to maintain if not improve its bronze ranking.

Tucumcari High School is one of three county high schools to be listed in the rankings.

Logan High School was ranked with above state average reading and match proficiency. House High School was ranked with near state average reading and math proficiency.

Only 54 out New Mexico’s 205 high schools made the U.S. News and World Report’s 2015 Best High Schools Rankings.

To produce the 2015 Best High Schools rankings, U.S. News and World Report teamed with North Carolina-based RTI International, a global nonprofit social science research firm.

RTI implemented the U.S. News comprehensive rankings methodology, which is based on these key principles: that a great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show it is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.

US News and RTI started by reviewing 29,070 public high schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Some of those schools had to be eliminated from consideration, mainly because they were too small to be analyzed.

The elimination process reduced the count to 19,753, which is the total number of public high schools across the country that had high enough 12th-grade enrollment and/or sufficient enrollment in other grades during the 2012-13 school year to be eligible for the rankings.