Staff Writer
FORT FAIRFIELD – SAD 20 Superintendent Marc Gendron has always known that Fort Fairfield Middle-High School was a great school, and now a national publication agrees with him. For the third consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report looked at thousands of public schools in the country to identify the most outstanding, and Fort Fairfield Middle-High School was placed on the list.
The 2010 U.S. News & World Report Americas Best High Schools methodology, developed by School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education data research business run by Standard & Poor’s, is based on the key principles that a great high school must serve all its students well, not just those who are college bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show the school is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.
“We analyzed 21,786 public high schools in 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This is the total number of public high schools that had 12th-grade enrollment and sufficient data, primarily from the 2007-08 school year, to analyze,” the Web site said. “A three-step process determined the best high schools. The first two steps ensured that the schools serve all their students well, using state proficiency standards as the 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 100 schools that did the best in the analysis earned gold medals. The next 461 schools were awarded silver medals, and an additional 1,189 schools earned bronze. Fort Fairfield Middle-High School received a bronze medal ranking.
“It was a huge surprise,” said Gendron. “They looked at our test scores and compared them to the expected performance based on the poverty index for the state, and results showed that our disadvantaged children scored higher than would be expected. Out of the schools that were eligible for bronze medals, we scored the highest.
“We’ve always felt that we’re spending a lot of time and effort on educating all our kids,” he said, “and this particular award is an affirmation that we are doing a good job reaching kids and having performances that exceed the norm.”
The school had a large banner created noting that it is one of America’s Best High Schools. The banner hangs in the gymnasium.
“The kids might not understand all of the details as to why we were chosen,” said Gendron, “but it makes them feel good about where they go to school, and hopefully it makes the parents and the community feel good, too.”
Principal Mark Jenkins noted that recognitions of this type are truly an acknowledgement of the entire district and town.
“The results are due to a tremendous, dedicated staff of teachers and support personnel who have been striving toward standard-based education and higher order thinking skills for years,” he said, noting that the students are the ones who did the work and tested to achieve the results.
Ten other schools in the state were recognized including Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, Greely, Katahdin, Mt. Abram Regional, Telstar, Waterville, York and the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. Fort Fairfield was rated sixth overall in the state.
