Overview

South Charleston High School is a public high school in the Spring Hill neighborhood of South Charleston, south of the Kanawha River and west of the city of Charleston. It is part of Kanawha County Schools, occupies a 65-acre campus, and is a Class AAA school -- West Virginia's highest enrollment classification for high school sports. Its colors are black and orange, its teams the Black Eagles, and its motto "It's a great day to be a Black Eagle."

The school has occupied three buildings since its founding. The original Louden District High School was built in downtown South Charleston in 1925, with a newer building a few blocks away in 1931. The Black Eagles football team went 14-0 and won the 2008 Class AAA state title, beating George Washington High School 39-8.

A minor staffing discrepancy: NCES records 47.00 classroom teachers FTE for 2024-25 (ratio 18.60), while Wikipedia gives 50.00 FTE and a ratio of 18.26. Wikipedia's ratio does not follow from its own figures -- 874 students against 50.00 FTE would be 17.48:1, not 18.26:1 -- suggesting its ratio and staffing figures come from different years. We use the NCES pairing, which is internally consistent.

Academics

No school-specific West Virginia Department of Education report-card data was located for this profile. Check the Department's school report cards directly for current results.

Neighborhood

The school is in South Charleston's Spring Hill neighborhood -- a separate municipality from Charleston, with its own police department. NeighborhoodScout records Charleston's population as 46,482.

The city and this school's city are not the same place, and one source specifically flags the distinction in the opposite direction from what a reader might expect. A West Virginia legal blog reviewing state crime data names South Charleston -- not Charleston -- among the state's higher-crime cities, citing a rate of 5,267 per 100,000. Most of the detailed neighborhood data available below (West Side, Downtown) is for the city of Charleston, and does not describe South Charleston. We present the Charleston figures as regional context only.

Crime & safety

Charleston's citywide figures are consistent in direction and vary in magnitude. Nextdoor reports an overall rate of 50.38 per 1,000 against a national 33.37, with property crime at 43.71 versus 20.05 and violent crime at 6.67 versus 13.32 -- that is, violent crime below the national figure while property crime runs more than double it. NeighborhoodScout reports 37 per 1,000, with 99% of West Virginia communities safer and a 1-in-27 victimization chance. AreaVibes reports daily violent crimes 1.51 times the national mean and daily property crimes 1.77 times. City-Data puts the 2025 crime index at 329 against a US average of 228.4, higher than 91.5% of US cities, noting the rate rose 2% from 2024 while homicides fell from 6 to 3, and that the last five years show declining violent crime.

CrimeGrade grades Charleston C- at the 34th percentile, with crime costing $461 per resident -- $3 below the national average and $99 above West Virginia's. It notes the intangible cost of $1,224 per resident comes entirely from violent crime rather than property loss.

DoorProfit's neighborhood pages for Charleston report West Side at C (index 175, 75% above national, murder the top concern at 168) and Downtown at C- (index 193, 93% above national, murder at 194, and "safer than 0% of neighborhoods in Charleston").

Two source problems worth recording.

The same broken statistic seen in Sioux Falls appears here. HomeSnacks states: "You have a 1 in 32.1 chance of being the victim of a property crime in Charleston each year. That compares to a 1 in 0.0 chance nationally." A 1-in-0.0 chance is not a quantity. This directory flagged the identical construction on the South Dakota profile, which means it is not a one-off typo but a systematic template failure on that site -- the same broken field rendering across different city pages, in the same confident sentence structure as its valid figures.

DoorProfit's grade descriptions contradict its own numbers. Its West Side page assigns C and states "It's average — crime is comparable to the national average" in the same breath as reporting the index at 175, which it correctly describes as "75% above the national average." Seventy-five percent above average is not comparable to average. This is the fifth profile in this directory -- after North Charleston, Houston, Burlington, and Seattle -- where this provider's verdict text does not follow from its own published index.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score. No academic data was located, the detailed neighborhood crime data describes a different municipality than the school's, and the available sources include one with a systematically broken statistic and one whose verdicts contradict its indices. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. NCES Common Core of Data, South Charleston High School (540060000442), 2024-25 school year (address, enrollment, classroom teachers FTE, ratio, locale, county, phone).
  2. Wikipedia, "South Charleston High School" (founding, consolidation, principal, staffing, campus size, colors, nickname, building history, 2008 state title).
  3. Wikipedia, "Charleston High School (West Virginia)" (1989 closure and consolidation into Capital High School; cited on the state page).
  4. SchoolDigger, Best High Schools in Charleston, West Virginia (city high school listing; George Washington and Capital rankings).
  5. Nextdoor, Charleston WV crime and safety resource page (overall, property, and violent rates against stated national and state averages).
  6. NeighborhoodScout, Charleston WV crime rates and statistics (rate per 1,000, victimization odds, state comparison, population).
  7. AreaVibes, Charleston WV crime rates, citing FBI UCR 2024 (daily crime multiples, police staffing).
  8. City-Data.com, Charleston West Virginia crime (2025 crime index, year-over-year change, homicide counts, five-year trends, law enforcement staffing).
  9. CrimeGrade.org, Charleston WV overall page (C- grade, 34th percentile, cost of crime tangible and intangible).
  10. DoorProfit, West Side and Downtown Charleston neighborhood crime pages (grades, indices, category breakdowns).
  11. HomeSnacks, Charleston WV crime report 2026 (total and property crime rates; the 1-in-0.0 error noted above).
  12. Crowe Law LLC, "West Virginia Crime Rate By City" (state ranking context; South Charleston rate).