Overview

Samuel S. Fels High School is a district-run high school in the Lawncrest section of Philadelphia, named for Samuel Simeon Fels. It was created in 1989 when Samuel S. Fels Junior High School was restructured to serve grades 7 through 10, with eleventh grade added in 1990 and twelfth in 1991. Melvin K. McMaster was its first principal; Melissa Rasper is listed as the current one. An $80 million building replaced the old facility in 2009.

The enrollment and staffing figures above are 2023-24 and come from Wikipedia's record. We did not locate an NCES 2024-25 CCD entry for this school in our searches, so unlike most profiles in this directory, these figures are not cross-checked against the federal directory.

Academics

No school-specific Pennsylvania assessment data was located for Fels itself. District-level figures are available: PublicSchoolReview, citing NCES and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, reports the School District of Philadelphia at 23% math proficiency, 36% reading, and 32% science, with a 73% graduation rate -- all in the bottom half of Pennsylvania districts. Those are district aggregates and should not be read as describing Fels.

One figure worth noting alongside them: the district spends $33,553 per student against a Pennsylvania median of $23,152, roughly 45% higher, and that figure has grown 7% over four school years. We're reporting spending and outcomes as separately sourced facts and drawing no causal link between them; the relationship between per-pupil spending and results depends on cost structures, student needs, and factors not captured in either number.

Neighborhood

Lawncrest is a residential neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia with a population of 11,718 per CrimeGrade. Citywide, Nextdoor reports Philadelphia's overall crime rate at 53.06 per 1,000 residents against a stated national figure of 33.37, while its violent crime rate of 10.28 runs below the stated national 13.32 -- the same property-heavy pattern seen in Fargo and Oklahoma City elsewhere in this directory.

Crime & safety

Lawncrest grades well on most measures. CrimeGrade gives it an A- overall (79th percentile, 23.89 crimes per 1,000), a B for violent crime (69th percentile, 3.253 per 1,000), a B+ for theft (76th percentile), and a B+ for assault (70th percentile). It describes the neighborhood as less safe than the Pennsylvania state average but safer than the national average -- the same baseline distinction that made Manchester, New Hampshire look worse against its state than against the country.

One category breaks sharply from the rest: murder, graded D at the 16th percentile, with a rate of 0.1573 per 1,000. A neighborhood safer than 79% of the country overall is, by the same provider's reckoning, less safe than 84% of it on homicide specifically.

That single-category divergence has a visible knock-on effect in the same provider's own cost figures, and it is worth following because it shows how an "A-" can conceal something serious. CrimeGrade puts the total cost of crime in Lawncrest at $399 per resident per year -- $140 above the national average and $172 above Philadelphia's own city average. So a neighborhood graded safer than the average American neighborhood carries a higher per-resident crime cost than the average American neighborhood, and a higher one than its own city, in a city whose overall crime rate runs about 59% above the national figure. Murder alone accounts for $296 of that $399. Homicide is rare but extraordinarily costly per incident, so a low-frequency, high-severity pattern can leave the headline grade looking reassuring while the underlying risk profile is not. Read the category breakdown, not the letter.

A second flag concerns how one provider frames school quality. CrimeGrade's SchoolGrade panel for Lawncrest reports schools averaging a C, with 35% actual proficiency against 29% projected, and concludes that schools "greatly exceed expectations." The verdict is driven by the gap between actual and projected performance rather than by the proficiency level itself, and the projection appears to be set from local characteristics. A C with 35% proficiency can therefore be reported as greatly exceeding expectations because the expectation was low. That is a defensible way to measure value added, but a parent reading "greatly exceed expectations" without the underlying numbers would take away something quite different from what the data says.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score. No school-specific academic data was located, the enrollment figures are uncorroborated against NCES, and the safety picture depends entirely on which category a reader looks at. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, "Samuel S. Fels High School" (address, founding and grade-phase history, first and current principals, staffing, enrollment, ratio, 2009 building).
  2. PublicSchoolReview, Philadelphia City School District profile, citing NCES and the Pennsylvania Department of Education (district proficiency, graduation rate, demographics, per-student spending).
  3. CrimeGrade.org, Lawncrest overall, violent, theft, assault, and murder crime pages (grades, percentiles, rates per 1,000, cost of crime per resident, neighborhood population, SchoolGrade panel).
  4. Nextdoor, Philadelphia crime and safety resource page (citywide overall and violent crime rates against stated national averages).