| Preuss School
Ranked Ninth in Nation by Newsweek
Ioana Patringenaru | May 29, 2007
The Preuss School at UCSD became the little charter
school that could last week. Preuss, which exclusively
serves students from low-income families without a
college education, has become one of the nation’s
top 10 high schools, according to Newsweek magazine.
To be more precise, Preuss ranked ninth on the magazine’s list of America’s 1200 best high schools. It’s the first year the campus, which opened in 1999, was ranked. It had not been around long enough to be considered in previous years.
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| Preuss Principal Doris Alvarez congratulates students. |
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“The Preuss School continues to be a source
of pride for UC San Diego, and we’re pleased
the school was recognized as one of the top high schools
in the country,” Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said.
Newsweek uses a “Challenge Index” to rank high school campuses. The scale tracks each school’s rate of participation in college-level tests, such as Advanced Placement, to find the most demanding schools that are supportive of all students. The magazine takes the total number of AP tests, plus International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests at each campus, and divides that figure by the number of graduating seniors.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Preuss Principal Doris Alvarez said of the Newsweek ranking. ”It was very exciting that they would even consider us.”
It’s very unusual for a school to make its first appearance at the top of the rankings, Newsweek’s Contributing Editor Jay Matthews told Alvarez. But college preparation, and specifically Advanced Placement classes, is a critical part of Preuss’ curriculum, Alvarez said. As a result, the school has a built-in advantage on Newsweek’s ranking scale. All its students are required to take AP tests if they want to earn AP credit for their classes, the principal said. The school gets waivers so students don’t have to pay for the tests.
While many of the campuses on Newsweek’s list are college-prep magnets with gifted and talented students, Preuss focuses exclusively on low-income students whose parents aren’t college graduates. All students qualify for free and reduced lunches, a common poverty indicator. By contrast, the percentage of students qualifying for subsidized lunches in the other nine high schools ranges from 0.1 to 46.3. Preuss’ students are 59 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian, 13 percent black and 6 percent white or other.
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| Students celebrated their ninth place in Newsweek's rankings. |
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“If given a chance, all students can succeed,” Fox said.
Preuss also differs from most California comprehensive high schools. It’s a charter school, which receives funds from the state, but is exempt from some provisions of California’s voluminous Education Code. The school year runs 198 days and the school day 396 minutes. By contrast, the school year runs 180 days in most of the state’s public schools. The school day runs an average of 360 minutes. Class sizes also are smaller at Preuss, with about 25 students, compared with 34 students districtwide in the San Diego Unified School District. This year, 96 percent of graduating seniors at Preuss will go on to a four-year college of university, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford.
The school celebrated its achievement Wednesday with chocolate fudge, white and carrot cakes during lunch. The school’s quad was decorated with blue and gold balloons. The recognition will be a source of pride for Preuss’ students, Alvarez said. Last week, seniors Maria Zuniga, 17, and Moises Esparza, 18, sounded quite proud indeed when they explained what made Preuss one of the nation’s top high schools.
“Here your teachers care more for you,” said Zuniga.
She said Preuss helped her figure out what she needed to do to attend a good four-year college. Before coming to Preuss in eighth grade, she didn’t even know about the SAT, she said. Back then, she attended a middle school close to her house, near Logan Heights. She could have made her way to a community college or state school, but no further, she said. Once at Preuss, she took nine AP classes and nine AP tests. Next fall, she plans to enroll at UCSD to study sociology and accounting. She decided to stay in San Diego to help care for her two younger siblings, ages 11 and 14. Her parents, a carpenter and a housekeeper, can’t help them with homework any more, she said.
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| Preuss seniors Moises Esparza and Maria Zuniga. |
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Meanwhile, Esparza plans to attend Columbia University this fall and major in film studies. He loves movies, he explained, ever since he perfected his English by watching them after coming to the United States from Mexico at age 6. He said Preuss’ focus on low-income students makes it special.
“Making it to college is a dream for a lot of students, but at many high schools, they don’t know how,” Esparza said.
Just like Zuniga, Esparza took nine AP classes. His favorite was an AP Spanish literature course in his sophomore year. It opened him up to the cultures and literatures of many Spanish-speaking countries, he said. “I just felt really at home,” he explained.
Esparza also added he got a lot of encouragement from his teachers. He said he formed a strong bond with his advisory teacher, Jeff Major, who has been guiding him since sixth grade. Major pushed him when he was applying for college. “His opinion is the one I value the most,” Esparza said.
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