Overview

Washington High School is a public secondary school in Sioux Falls, one of four traditional high schools in the Sioux Falls School District. Founded in 1908, it succeeded Central School and Irving High School as the city's principal public secondary school, built to accommodate a larger student capacity. Its colors are orange and black, its mascot the Warrior, and its rival Lincoln High School. Its motto is "To develop life-long learners to succeed in a changing world."

Wikipedia's article on this school contradicts itself on enrollment within a single page: the infobox states 1,810 students for 2025-26, while the article's opening sentence states an enrollment of 1,910. The 100-student gap is not attributable to different years, since both appear in the same current article. The 15.01:1 ratio shown above is Wikipedia's own figure against 123.85 FTE teaching staff; note that 1,810 ÷ 123.85 = 14.61 and 1,910 ÷ 123.85 = 15.42, so the stated ratio matches neither enrollment figure exactly. We report the range rather than choosing.

Academics

No current school-level South Dakota assessment data was located for this profile. Wikipedia records two historical distinctions: a U.S. News & World Report silver medal ranking in South Dakota, and that the class of 2009 was the only school to achieve a minimum level of proficiency among all groups tested on the state assessment. Neither is dated to the present, and the 2009 result is now well over fifteen years old -- it should not be read as describing the school today. Check the South Dakota Department of Education directly for current results.

Neighborhood

The school is on North Sycamore Avenue in eastern Sioux Falls, in Minnehaha County. We did not locate crime data specific to this school's immediate neighborhood; the figures below are citywide.

Crime & safety

Sioux Falls is the rare case in this directory where an official municipal source is available, and it is unambiguous. The City of Sioux Falls reported in March 2026 that the city saw decreases across most major crime categories in 2025, including a five-year low in violent crime per capita and a 26% decrease in property crime per capita from 2024 to 2025. Local reporting on the same presentation noted stolen vehicles down roughly 700 cases since 2023, following a campaign urging residents to lock their doors, with the mayor describing it as the proudest crime report of his tenure.

The commercial index providers, working from FBI UCR data that predates or overlaps that improvement, are considerably harsher and disagree with one another on the verdict. NeighborhoodScout reports 35 crimes per 1,000 residents and describes Sioux Falls as having one of the highest crime rates in America across communities of all sizes, with 96% of South Dakota communities safer and violent crime "one of the highest in the nation." AreaVibes reports the city is safer than only 8% of South Dakota cities and 11% of US cities. HomeSnacks, citing FBI UCR 2024, puts the total crime rate at 3,442.0 per 100,000 -- 62.42% above the national rate and 76.67% above the South Dakota rate. Nextdoor reports an overall rate of 37.69 per 1,000 against a stated national 33.37, but a violent crime rate of 5.65 against a national 13.32, and concludes the city is considered a safe place to live.

DoorProfit is the sharpest outlier: it gives Sioux Falls a citywide safety rating of A ("Very Safe"), reporting that of 22 neighborhoods analyzed for 2026, 68.2% received an A and the remaining 31.8% a B, with zero neighborhoods falling into C, D, or F. It states that even the city's highest-crime areas -- Pettigrew Heights and West Tenth Street, both B- -- remain above average nationally.

Two observations, one of which is a plain error rather than a disagreement.

First, an arithmetic impossibility. HomeSnacks states: "You have a 1 in 34.3 chance of being the victim of a property crime in Sioux Falls each year. That compares to a 1 in 0.0 chance nationally." A 1-in-0.0 chance is not a quantity. It appears to be a division-by-zero or formatting failure rendered in the same confident sentence structure as the site's valid figures. Its neighbouring numbers may well be sound, but a reader has no way to tell which fields on such a page are computed and which are broken.

Second, the providers are not measuring the same period. NeighborhoodScout's "one of the highest crime rates in America" and the City of Sioux Falls' "five-year low in violent crime" are not necessarily contradictory: the index sites draw on FBI UCR data through 2024, while the city's report covers calendar 2025. A city can simultaneously rank poorly against national peers and be improving sharply year over year -- Detroit and Baltimore elsewhere in this directory show the same pattern. Where an official municipal crime report exists, as here, it is both more current and more directly sourced than the commercial indices, and we weight it accordingly without discarding the comparative rankings.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score. Enrollment is internally contradictory in its own source, no current academic data was located, and citywide safety assessments range from "one of the highest crime rates in America" to a citywide A. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, "Washington High School (Sioux Falls, South Dakota)" (address, founding, motto, principal, superintendent, teaching staff FTE, enrollment figures, ratio, colors, mascot, rival, USNWR silver medal, 2009 proficiency result).
  2. Wikipedia articles for Lincoln, Roosevelt, Jefferson, Joe Foss, and Sioux Falls New Technology high schools (district composition; New Tech closure and absorption into Jefferson).
  3. City of Sioux Falls, "Sioux Falls Violent Crime at 5-Year Low, Other Crimes Decrease in 2025," March 3, 2026 (official per-capita violent and property crime figures).
  4. Dakota News Now, "Five-year low for violent crimes in Sioux Falls, but still more to do," March 3, 2026 (stolen vehicle decline, police chief and mayor remarks).
  5. NeighborhoodScout, Sioux Falls crime rates and statistics (rate per 1,000, victimization odds, state and national comparisons).
  6. AreaVibes, Sioux Falls crime rates (state and national percentile, victimization odds, daily crime multiples).
  7. HomeSnacks, Sioux Falls crime report 2026, citing FBI UCR 2024 (total, violent, and property crime rates; the 1-in-0.0 error noted above).
  8. Nextdoor, Sioux Falls crime and safety resource page (overall and violent rates against stated national averages).
  9. DoorProfit, Sioux Falls crime map (citywide A rating, neighborhood grade distribution, unemployment and poverty figures).
  10. Niche, Sioux Falls crime and safety (resident survey responses).
  11. Wikipedia, "Crime in South Dakota" (2020 statewide violent and property crime rates against national averages).