West Anchorage High School

Overview

West Anchorage High School, opened in 1953 as Anchorage High School, is the oldest of the Anchorage School District's eight major high schools, serving the western parts of downtown and midtown Anchorage. It's Alaska's largest high school by enrollment.

Academics

No independently verified Alaska state assessment proficiency data was located for this profile; check the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development's school-profile site directly for current figures. The Anchorage School District overall serves over 42,500 students across roughly 94 schools with a district-wide student:teacher ratio of about 19:1, for context against this individual school's 20.8:1.

Neighborhood

The school sits in Anchorage's midtown/west area, in the Municipality of Anchorage -- Alaska's largest city and, unlike much of the state, connected by road to the rest of the urban Railbelt corridor rather than accessible only by plane or boat.

Crime & safety

Multiple independent sources consistently describe Anchorage's crime rate as above both the Alaska state average and the national average -- a different picture from most of the Alabama schools profiled so far. One FBI-UCR-based source puts the city's overall crime rate about 12% above the national average and its violent crime rate in roughly the 6th safety percentile nationally. A separate source citing the same underlying FBI data put violent crime as high as 211% above the national average, though exact multipliers vary somewhat by provider and year.

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 the underlying figures themselves vary by source, see above), we're not showing a calculated number for this profile. See our ratings methodology.

Sources