Top Denver high school

[esya]

There is a website sponsored by a charitable group that posts very good info on denver schools, I can't think of the name of it but maybe you can google it. Does anyone recall? It has demographics on the Denver school (education level of teachers, number of teachers with master's degrees, etc) and neighborhood by neighborhood, much better than the state of colorado info which is totally stupid because of the reliance on CSAPs.

My middle daughter went through the George Washington IB program but now East High is also very popular with the scholastically ambitious set. She is graduating from Univ of Chicago, got offers from MIT and Berkeley and I forget where else. It is a very rigid curriculum and I never would have picked it for myself or my kids, but now my youngest is also in it. I would have gone for more variety in the course choices, but the program is well respected and gets lots of good college recruiters and speakers for the kids. However the principle is changing this year and the district is changing so who the heck ever knows anymore? If you ask people from the burbs they will characterize it as an "inner city" school but my husband is from NYC and I am from a mixed race school in Ohio so what do we know except our kids have always liked being in school in DPS. The School of the ARts is hard to get into bec they place suburbanite kids over city kids, and the technology school may be fine, it's only a few years old and in a neat neighborhood, newer, called Stapleton.

Cherry Creek for years has been considered the best but the problems of aging, increased population, etc, has caught up with it. There are also many terrific private and parochial high schools in Denver area.

[BlueWillowPlate]

Originally Posted by esya

There is a website sponsored by a charitable group that posts very good info on denver schools, I can't think of the name of it but maybe you can google it. Does anyone recall? It has demographics on the Denver school (education level of teachers, number of teachers with master's degrees, etc) and neighborhood by neighborhood, much better than the state of colorado info which is totally stupid because of the reliance on CSAPs.

Ah, yes, those dreaded CSAPs.
I think maybe you're talking about GreatSchools

My middle daughter went through the George Washington IB program but now East High is also very popular with the scholastically ambitious set. She is graduating from Univ of Chicago, got offers from MIT and Berkeley and I forget where else. It is a very rigid curriculum and I never would have picked it for myself or my kids, but now my youngest is also in it. I would have gone for more variety in the course choices, but the program is well respected and gets lots of good college recruiters and speakers for the kids. However the principle is changing this year and the district is changing so who the heck ever knows anymore? If you ask people from the burbs they will characterize it as an "inner city" school but my husband is from NYC and I am from a mixed race school in Ohio so what do we know except our kids have always liked being in school in DPS. The School of the ARts is hard to get into bec they place suburbanite kids over city kids, and the technology school may be fine, it's only a few years old and in a neat neighborhood, newer, called Stapleton.

Cherry Creek for years has been considered the best but the problems of aging, increased population, etc, has caught up with it. There are also many terrific private and parochial high schools in Denver area.

Interesting to hear what you say about Cherry Creek.
My younger son attended East High (it was actually our neighborhood school) for two years before we moved. It was a bit crowded, but he loved it and it was my school as well.
It's true that schools are what you make of them, and certainly a child's first educator is his parent.
The "best" this or that won't help anyone if it is not a good fit.

[denverian]

It's great to hear that GW and East are decent schools. Not many cities have good or even average schools in their core anymore. I'll have kids in high school in Denver, but not for 15 years, so who knows by then. We'll have a HS at Stapleton, but not exactly sure when it will be built. I know the design has been approved.

[karadchina]

Could you, please, recommend top Denver high schools with excellent academic performance, strong curriculum to get prepared for a university? (preferrably expensive schools with higher tuition costs)

[Katarina Witt]

Virtually all the public comprehensive high schools in the metro Denver area offer college prep curriculums. The guidance counselors at the schools can tell you how many students go on to college and where they go.

My kids both went to Monarch High School in Louisville. 90+% of the students there go on to further education. Both of mine went to (too) expensive private colleges. One transferred back to CU.

[Tallybalt]

The academic setup in Denver is different from cities on the east coast. The pressure on the east Coast to attend prestigious private universities (such as the Ivy League, Stanford, Amherst, Swarthmore, or the very best public universities along the lines of Berkeley or University of Virginia) is intense, and spills over to the high schools. A lot people choose schools not just for academics but for the college placement record, and you can easily find out which schools, public and private, in the Washington DC area have the best records for placing its graduates into the best colleges. Same for NYC, or Philadelphia, and so on.

Denver, on the other hand, is a different story. The number of kids in metro Denver who go on to the nation's best colleges is small because most people are satisfied with CU-Boulder or Colorado State. The graduates of those schools tend to do well in life, and the alumni network for those schools is very strong within Colorado, so families don't necessarily see the point of shelling out $50,000/year tuition to go to Amherst or Dartmouth or Stanford. This sentiment also fuels some ignorance of colleges outside Colorado, which is a bit unfortunate.

Within the Denver metro area, the schools with the best reputation for sending students to prestigious out of state colleges are the following: East High and Cherry Creek High for publics, and Kent-Denver and Colorado Academy for privates. However, good students from many other schools in the metro area go elsewhere. The big advantage of the four schools (besides academics ) is that they have excellent college guidance counselors and a student body that is aware of the possibilities and realities of attending the better colleges in the country.

[Katarina Witt]

In re: the above post: I think Fairview and Boulder Highs in Boulder, Monarch in Louisville, Niwot HS in Niwot and a lot of other schools also have good out of state placement at "prestigious" colleges. For example, the valedictorian of DD#1's class went to Stanford along with one of his close friends; the salutatorian of DD#2's class went to Carnegie-Mellon, a lot of kids from Monarch go to MIT, USC and other big name schools.

[vegaspilgrim]

I graduated from Smoky Hill High School in Aurora (Cherry Creek school district), from the IB Program. I have friends from my HS who are at: MIT (3 people!), Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, Boston College, Wellesley, Brandeis, U. of Virginia, Northwestern, Notre Dame, U. of Michigan, U. of North Carolina, Stanford, Baylor, Rice, Colorado School of Mines, and the U.S. Naval Academy. I also have a friend who got into Cal Tech, but chose to go to Boulder instead. If that list isn't prestigious enough... I don't know what is! I got into all the schools I applied to, including NYU, but instead I choose to go to Arizona State. Go figure??? Within the CC school district, Cherry Creek High School gets most of the attention, but Smoky Hill, IMO, is just as good, perhaps even better, and is seriously underrated. The education is just as good as Creek, but with WAY more cultural diversity (students whose families come from all over the world, speaking dozens of different languages), and WAY fewer spoiled brats.

[Tallybalt]

I can see my post was a bit unclear. There are good students from high schools all over the metro area who go to good colleges outside of Colorado, and the advantage of East or Cherry Creek over the others is minor, especially when most students stay in-state for college.

But if one had to hold a gun to my head and force out an answer as to the "best" schools in Denver for going on to prestigious colleges, then East and Cherry Creek have to be at the top of the list for public schools, and K-D and CA for the privates.

Originally Posted by pittnurse70

In re: the above post: I think Fairview and Boulder Highs in Boulder, Monarch in Louisville, Niwot HS in Niwot and a lot of other schools also have good out of state placement at "prestigious" colleges. For example, the valedictorian of DD#1's class went to Stanford along with one of his close friends; the salutatorian of DD#2's class went to Carnegie-Mellon, a lot of kids from Monarch go to MIT, USC and other big name schools.

[Katarina Witt]

Originally Posted by Tallybalt

I can see my post was a bit unclear. There are good students from high schools all over the metro area who go to good colleges outside of Colorado, and the advantage of East or Cherry Creek over the others is minor, especially when most students stay in-state for college.

But if one had to hold a gun to my head and force out an answer as to the "best" schools in Denver for going on to prestigious colleges, then East and Cherry Creek have to be at the top of the list for public schools, and K-D and CA for the privates.

I still think some of us would disagree. There is more to public education in CO than the DPS and Cherry Creek schools. Private schools, I don't know beans about.