Gaston school ranked in the top 10 in North Carolina
Gastonia’s Highland School of Technology was ranked 8th in the state in a U.S. News and World Report assessment.
What makes Highland stand out? According to Highland Principal James Montgomery, the admissions process, servant-style leadership, and hands-on learning make the difference.
Highland school aims to teach the kids, “How do you win, but yet, do it the right way?”
Admission
The fate of every Highland Student hangs in the balance of a lottery.
Freshman students looking to attend Highland, a merit-based magnet school, submit an application, which is then randomized, “at the push of a button,” according to Montgomery.
The randomized list of names is then reviewed by administration all summer long.
According to Montgomery, they start at the top, looking at a few factors including whether or not the student meets the enrollment requirements.
“You just go down the list until you have 145 students,” Montgomery said.
The classroom
The average student to teacher ratio at Highland is 13 students per one teacher.
This enables teachers to give more attention and personalized instruction to each student, according to Montgomery.
“The power of the Highland education is that our graduates will graduate with an understanding of every course they take, all 32 of them,” Montgomery said.
U.S. News and World report ranks schools based on five factors.
Those include college readiness, state assessment proficiency and performance, college curriculum breadth, and graduation rate.
In those categories, Highland School was ranked 51st in college readiness statewide, 6th in state assessment proficiency, 12th in state assessment performance, 64th in college curriculum breadth, and tied for first place in graduation rate.
The U.S. News and World Report also ranked Highland 424th out of more than 17,000 schools in their national report.
Beyond the classroom
A teaching that works well in the classroom, but is also designed to help Highland students navigate life after high school is, “leadership through service,” according to Montgomery.
“We train kids to lead, and give them opportunities to lead and serve,” Montgomery said.
Teaching servant-style leadership to their students is an important factor in Highland’s success, and makes a huge impact on the learning environment, according to Montgomery.
“People say, ‘oh, kids today are the worst,’” Montgomery said. “That’s not true.”
Montgomery has been in education for 32 years, and has spent the last five of them at Highland.
As a child, Montgomery actually attended Highland when it was a junior high school.
The facility became Highland School of technology in 2000, when the administration decided to open up what Montgomery calls, “a grand experiment.”
The experiment was designed to see if they could make Highland a school that people would want to attend, rather than one they had to attend.
“They had no clue the experiment would become a top school in North Carolina,” Montgomery said.
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Gaston school ranked in the top 10 in North Carolina
