Paloma Valley earns high Silver Award ranking

Paloma Valley High School has been awarded the Silver Award by U.S. News and World Report's Best High Schools in America rankings for the third year in a row, it was recently announced.

Paloma Valley was ranked in the top 11 percent of the 20,487 schools reviewed nationally, according to a news release.

The rankings are based on the following key principles: that a great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show it is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.

A four-step process determined the Best High Schools. The first three steps ensured that the schools serve all of their students well, using their performance on the math and reading parts of their state proficiency tests and their graduation rates as the benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first three steps, a fourth step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work.