William Fremd High School was recently ranked 32 out of 708 schools in Illinois and a national rank of 689 out of 19,400 public schools, according to US News’s release of 2014 Best High School Rankings.

Principal Kurt Tenopir believes the reason for Fremd’s achievement is due to the hard work of every individual who is involved in the school’s educational system.

“I think it is nice to be recognized around the state as one of the premier high schools in the Chicago area, and I think we take a lot of pride in that,” Tenopir said. “There is a lot of people to give credit to for that. We have some very hard working students, our staff works very hard to make sure we are providing a great education and of course I think our parents are doing a wonderful job of emphasizing the importance of education in their children.”

Sophomore Devin Dionne believes that Fremd’s accomplishment represents the school’s accumulation of academic successes in the past.

“Being this highly ranked means that the school has gained so much over the past years to achieve goals,” Dionne said. “It really puts our name out there in the world and represents our pride and success.”

US News uses a three step process to determine if a school would attain a position in their list of Best High Schools. The first two steps examines the school’s performance on state proficiency tests, and verifies that the school was properly meeting the needs of every student. If the school makes it past the first two steps, a third step decides the level at which the school prepares its students for college.

Assistant Principal Kim Glaser thinks Fremd’s high rank on the list confirms the existence of a diverse  range of courses at Fremd.

“I think that it speaks to a lot of work that we’ve been doing as a school and as a district to offer as many opportunities as we can for students to have access to rigorous curriculum,” Glaser said. “We offer a lot of classes here that have very strong connections to college and career. It speaks to the work we have been doing, but it also keeps us pushing ourselves to keep wanting to innovate what we’re doing.”

Fremd was also one of the 53 schools in Illinois awarded with a silver medal, which are given to schools that passed the first two steps in the national ranking process, and have a College Readiness Index at or above 18.17. The maximum CRI a school could attain was 100. Fremd’s CRI was 41.7.

Junior Stephanie Mbi thinks that the staff and students at Fremd are the reason behind Fremd’s ability to make it this far with the US News rankings.

“Fremd has really good teachers and a staff that create a comfortable learning environment for the students,” Mbi said. “And Fremd has so many talented students in all fields such as sports, academics and music. The students at Fremd should continue to strive to become the very best they can be, and the faculty should continue to do their best everyday to aid and guide the students in accomplishing this goal.”

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