Overview

Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School is a public charter school in Bessemer, a Jefferson County city southwest of Birmingham. As a charter school it operates under its own charter agreement rather than as a standard zoned district school, with an aerospace/aviation focus reflected in its name.

Academics

NCES directory data for 2024-25 records 99 students eligible for free lunch out of 161 total enrollment. No independently verified state assessment proficiency data was located for this profile; check the Alabama State Department of Education's report-card site directly.

Neighborhood

Bessemer is a Jefferson County city in the Birmingham-Hoover metro area, with a population of roughly 25,000-27,000 depending on the source and year, and a history tied to the region's steelmaking industry.

Crime & safety

Unlike the other Alabama schools profiled so far, Bessemer's crime data points toward meaningfully elevated risk rather than below-average risk. FBI-data-based analysis puts the city's five-year (2019-2024) average violent crime rate at roughly 331% above the national average, and property crime about 209% above. A separate index ranks Bessemer in the 14th percentile for safety nationally on violent crime specifically -- meaning it's safer than only about 14% of U.S. cities that index tracks.

This is the first Alabama school profile in this batch where the city-level safety data is clearly worse than the state and national averages, rather than better. We're showing it exactly as sourced rather than omitting or softening it -- a directory that only ever shows favorable safety data isn't a trustworthy one.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score. Based on the 1 of 3 possible components we could source for this school (safety, and it's a low one), a partial rating would be misleadingly precise given how thin the underlying data is -- we're not showing a number for this profile yet. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. NCES Common Core of Data, School Search -- Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School, NCES ID 010021302528.
  2. CrimeExplorer.com, Bessemer 5-year FBI crime data summary.
  3. CrimeGrade.org, Bessemer violent-crime analysis, 2025.