Overview

North Charleston High School is a public high school in North Charleston, part of the Charleston County School District. Its colors are blue and gold and its teams the Cougars. NCES lists it as a regular, open, non-charter school.

Since 2018 the campus has also housed Pattison's Academy, a charter school serving students aged 5 to 21 with disabilities, which moved into a wing of the building with roughly 35 students at the time. Separately, the district announced in 2018 that the school's 5,000-seat Attaway-Heinsohn Stadium -- built in the 1950s for $160,000 and dedicated in 1956 -- would be demolished and replaced with the North Charleston Center for Advanced Studies, with games moved to another stadium.

Staffing

The most striking figure in this record is the student:teacher ratio. NCES reports 829 students against 90.00 classroom teachers (FTE) for 2024-25, a ratio of 9.21:1. Wikipedia's 2023-24 figures agree closely: 785 students, 86.00 FTE, 9.13:1. Both are drawn from the same federal source family, so this is corroboration rather than two independent measurements -- but it is internally consistent across two years.

For context within the same district, NCES and Wikipedia give R.B. Stall High School 2,025 students to 120.80 FTE (16.76:1), Academic Magnet High School 740 students to 44.60 FTE (16.59:1), and St. John's High School 423 students to 30.00 FTE (14.10:1). North Charleston High therefore runs at roughly half the students-per-teacher of its district peers -- including the district's selective admissions magnet, which by reputation would be the school one might expect to be most generously staffed. We are reporting the figure, not explaining it: unusually low ratios can reflect deliberate intervention staffing, declining enrollment against a stable faculty, how specialist and support staff are classified, or the presence of the co-located special-education academy. None of those explanations is established by the sources we found.

Academics

No school-specific South Carolina report-card data was located for this profile. Check the South Carolina Department of Education's school report cards directly.

NCES's own free- and reduced-price lunch fields for this school are marked "‡", which in NCES notation means the data do not meet NCES data quality standards. We are not reporting an economic-disadvantage figure for this school, because the federal source is itself declining to stand behind one.

Neighborhood

The school is on East Montague Avenue in North Charleston, a city distinct from Charleston with its own police department.

Crime & safety

North Charleston produced a four-fold spread in the basic crime rate. Nextdoor reports 59.66 crimes per 1,000 residents against a stated national average of 33.37. NeighborhoodScout reports 47 per 1,000, calling it one of the highest rates in America across communities of all sizes, with a 1-in-21 victimization chance and 87% of South Carolina communities safer. AreaVibes puts the victimization chance at 1 in 21 as well, and describes the city as safer than only 4% of US cities. DoorProfit grades the city C-, at 27% above the national average, with a 1-in-239 violent-crime chance. And a local security-industry article reports roughly 15 total crimes per 1,000 residents, below a stated South Carolina average of over 26.

One of these figures can be checked rather than merely flagged. The same security-industry article states that violent crime in North Charleston is "exceptionally low, at roughly 0.8 incidents per 1,000 residents." CrimeGrade puts the violent crime rate at 9.069 per 1,000 and grades it F at the 5th percentile. Macrotrends, charting FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data, records North Charleston's violent crime rate at 920.77 per 100,000 in 2018 -- that is, 9.21 per 1,000.

Two independent sources land within 2% of each other at roughly 9 per 1,000. The 0.8 figure is off by a factor of about eleven from both. We are not treating that as an unresolvable disagreement: the weight of corroborated evidence sits with the higher figure, and the outlier appears to be an error or to be measuring something other than what it says. Where triangulation is possible, this directory will say so rather than presenting every conflict as equally open.

A second problem is presentational. DoorProfit maintains a neighborhood page for an area called "North Charleston" within the city of North Charleston, which produces sentences such as "North Charleston in North Charleston, SC has a crime safety grade of B+" and "North Charleston is safer than 75% of neighborhoods in North Charleston." That page assigns a B+ and calls the area "generally considered a safe neighborhood" while simultaneously reporting its crime index as 144 -- 44% above the national average -- and naming murder as its most elevated category at 36% above average. The same provider's city-level page grades North Charleston C- at 27% above the national average, yet its neighborhood page states the city average index is 169, which would be 69% above. Those two figures come from the same provider and do not agree.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score. Here there is no academic data, NCES declines to certify the economic-disadvantage figures, and the citywide crime rate spans 15 to 59.66 per 1,000 depending on source. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. NCES Common Core of Data, North Charleston High (450144000251), 2024-25 school year (enrollment, classroom teachers FTE, ratio, locale, county, status, lunch-data quality flag).
  2. Wikipedia, "North Charleston High School" (address, NCES ID, 2023-24 enrollment and staffing, colors, nickname, Attaway-Heinsohn Stadium history and replacement, Pattison's Academy co-location).
  3. Wikipedia and NCES records for R.B. Stall High School, Academic Magnet High School (450144000168), and St. John's High School (district staffing comparison).
  4. Nextdoor, North Charleston crime and safety resource page (overall crime rate against stated national average).
  5. NeighborhoodScout, North Charleston crime rates and statistics (rate per 1,000, victimization odds, state comparison).
  6. AreaVibes, North Charleston crime rates, citing FBI Uniform Crime Reports 2024 (victimization odds, state and national percentile).
  7. CrimeGrade.org, North Charleston violent crime page (violent crime rate, grade, percentile).
  8. DoorProfit, North Charleston city crime statistics and "North Charleston" neighborhood page (grades, indices, crime-type breakdown).
  9. Niche, North Charleston crime and safety (grade, resident survey responses).
  10. Macrotrends, North Charleston SC crime rate 1999-2018, charting FBI UCR violent crime data.
  11. Charleston Security Systems, "Charleston Crime Trends by Neighborhood (2026 Update)" (the 15 per 1,000 and 0.8 per 1,000 figures discussed above).