Overview

Hartford Public High School, founded in 1638, is part of Hartford Public Schools and is the second-oldest public secondary school in the United States, after Boston Latin School. NCES directory data records 538 students eligible for free lunch and 8 for reduced-price lunch out of 698 total enrollment.

Academics

No independently verified Connecticut state assessment data (via EdSight) was located for this profile; check the Connecticut State Department of Education's EdSight site directly for current school-level results.

Neighborhood

The school is located in Hartford, Connecticut's capital city, in the Capitol Planning Region.

Crime & safety

Hartford produced the widest and most contradictory set of safety figures found anywhere in this directory so far. One source describes Hartford's overall crime rate as slightly below the national average; a separate source, using the same category ("violent crime"), ranks Hartford in the 86th percentile for violent-crime safety nationally -- safer than 86% of cities. Yet other sources describe Hartford's overall crime rate as 75% above national average, 384% above national average, or give it a 15th-percentile safety ranking (higher crime than 85% of US cities). One source explicitly notes that safety varies dramatically by neighborhood within Hartford, from an A+ grade in North Meadows to an F+ grade in the Northeast/North End.

This is the widest disagreement in this directory to date -- from "safer than the national average" to "384% above the national average," for the same city, the same year. We can't responsibly resolve this to a single figure. What the sources agree on: safety varies enormously by specific Hartford neighborhood, more than the citywide averages suggest, and this school's own immediate block wasn't independently assessed for this profile. Treat every citywide Hartford crime statistic you encounter, including all of the ones cited here, with real skepticism until you can find neighborhood-specific data.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score, and this is the clearest case yet for withholding one entirely: the underlying safety data disagrees so much across sources that any rating built on it would be more misleading than helpful. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, "Hartford Public High School," cross-checked against NCES ID 090192001925.
  2. Nextdoor Neighbors resource page, Hartford crime and safety, 2026.
  3. CrimeGrade.org, Hartford violent-crime and overall-crime analyses, 2025.
  4. NeighborhoodScout, Hartford crime data, citing FBI crime data, 2026.
  5. AreaVibes, Hartford crime rate summary, 2026.
  6. LocalObserverDaily.com, Hartford crime rate summary, 2026.
  7. DoorProfit.com, Hartford crime statistics and neighborhood heatmap, citing FBI UCR data, 2026.
  8. CrimeByCity.com, Hartford crime rate and safety score, citing FBI 2024 data, 2026.