County Schools Tagged As 'Best Buys'

Tippecanoe Valley, Triton, Warsaw, Wawasee and Whitko high schools were named by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce as among Indiana's "Best Buy" schools.

The chamber defined Best Buy schools as "those public high schools that are providing exceptional educational value for the tax dollars they receive. Best Buy schools are those that offer all of us, taxpayers and stakeholders in the public education system, the greatest return in terms of student achievement for our educational dollar."

To determine which schools qualify as Best Buys, the chamber used ISTEP scores, graduation and attendance rates and SAT composite scores and participation rates for 12th-graders to develop each school's "quality index," which they then compared with the school's expenditures per pupil and at-risk factor ranking (at-risk factors include poverty, students from single-parent homes and percentage of adults within the school district with no high school diploma).

For 2002, 112 high schools out of 346 public schools in the state were named Best Buys.

The chamber listed the state median expenditure per pupil as $5,432.62. Expenditures per student at the area schools were: Tippecanoe Valley, $4,804.62; Triton, $5,132.98; WCHS, $5,213.29; Wawasee, $5,142.45; and Whitko, $4,971.61.

Six Indiana schools were named by the chamber as the "Best of the Best," or the schools that had the largest variances between their quality indexes and their expenditures per student. Those were: Barr-Reeve Jr.-Sr. High School, Montgomery; Center Grove High School, Greenwood; Crown Point High School, Crown Point; Clay City Jr. Sr. High School, Clay City; Fairfield Jr.-Sr. High School, Goshen; and Heritage Hills High School, Lincoln City.