Overview

Ramsay High School is a magnet high school founded in 1930 and now an International Baccalaureate school -- the only Birmingham City school focused exclusively on college preparation. It sits in the Five Points South neighborhood, about two miles south of downtown Birmingham. As a selective magnet program, it draws students from across the city rather than a single residential attendance zone.

Academics

NCES directory data for 2024-25 records 386 students eligible for free lunch out of 762 total enrollment. School-specific Alabama Comprehensive Assessment Program results weren't independently verified for this profile; check the Alabama State Department of Education's report-card site directly for current proficiency figures.

Neighborhood

Five Points South is a dense, walkable entertainment and dining district near downtown Birmingham -- a different character from a typical residential attendance zone, given the concentration of bars, restaurants, and nightlife foot traffic in its commercial core.

Crime & safety

Crime-index sources disagree substantially on Five Points South, and the disagreement is itself informative. One FBI-data-based index puts the neighborhood's overall crime rate in roughly the 4th-7th safety percentile nationally, driven heavily by property crime and theft concentrated in its commercial core. A separate index describes the same neighborhood as safer than 55% of Birmingham neighborhoods specifically.

These two figures use different baselines, not different facts: one compares Five Points South to every neighborhood nationally, where its commercial density and foot traffic push the rate up; the other compares it only to other Birmingham neighborhoods. Both cite FBI-derived data. We show both rather than picking the more flattering one.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score. Based on the components we could source for this school -- safety percentile only, and that figure itself is contested between sources (see above) -- a rating would reflect just 1 of 3 possible components built on disputed underlying data, which we consider too thin and too uncertain to display responsibly. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, "Ramsay High School," cross-checked against NCES ID 010039000176.
  2. NCES Common Core of Data, School Search -- Ramsay High School, 2024-25 school year.
  3. CrimeGrade.org, Five Points South crime and property-crime analyses, 2025-2026.
  4. DoorProfit.com, Five Points South crime statistics, 2026.