The Board of Directors of MSAD 20 is proud to announce that Fort Fairfield Middle High School has been recognized by US News and World Report as one of America’s Best High Schools.  The recognition is based on the key principle 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 outcomes to show the school is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.  The indicators included looking at reading and math results for all students on each state’s high school test and identifying the schools that were performing better than statistical expectations. 

     The survey analyzed 21,786 public high schools in 48 states plus the District of Columbia.  Overall, nine other schools in the State were recognized, the others being Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, Greely, Katahdin, Mt. Abram Regional, Telstar, Waterville, and the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.  It is important to note that the other Aroostook County School recognized MSSM was a gold medal winner and earned 56^th place in the top 100.

     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 towards standards based education and higher order thinking skills for years.  He also correctly noted that the students are the ones who did the work and tested to achieve these results.  Assistant Principal, Tim Watt also wishes to thank the students and parents for their efforts.

     Marc Gendron, Superintendent of the district expressed how very proud he was of the entire PK to 12 staff and students for placing the district in a position to be recognized in this way.

Fort Fairfield Middle High School was rated 6^th overall in the State.

     For more information visit http://www.usnews.com/directories/high-schools/index_html .  Click on Maine to see which area schools were selected.  You can get the criteria by clicking on Fort Fairfield MHS and the summary data from all the schools by clicking on “more detail” at the top of the Maine page.  You can also click on “Methodology” to see additional details on selected criteria.

12/1/09