While the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District doesn’t officially open for classes until Thursday, September 6, the schools are already preparing for the new academic year. Open houses at the elementary and middle schools begin Monday, August 27 (see page 14 for listings), and fall sports teams are already on the practice fields (High School South begins its football season Friday, September 7, at home against Trenton; North opens Saturday, September 8, hosting Rancocas).
And, just to keep schools on our minds, the biannual and sometimes controversial New Jersey Monthly ranking of the top 100 public high schools has just been released. Not everyone in WW-P will be happy.
Using a new ranking system that places greater emphasis than before on student outcomes, as opposed to school resources, New Jersey Monthly ranks both high schools, North and South, lower than it had two years ago. North slipped from No. 29 to 32, still ahead of traditional ranking rivals Princeton (59) and Montgomery (61), but one notch behind Hopewell Valley, which improved from 38 to 31 in the new rating system.
South declined dramatically in the New Jersey Monthly rankings, falling from 16 to 62, just behind Montgomery and Princeton. Looking at the schools from the point of view of the Department of Education’s “district factor group,” which assigns schools to groups based on socioeconomic indicators, neither WW-P high school ended up in the top 10 in their group, the wealthiest in the state.
