For the third straight year the school has been ranked as one of the best in the US News and World Report, earning another gold medal.

“Once again Lovejoy High School is a Gold Medal school,” deputy superintendent Dennis Muizers said in his Curriculum Express report. “Gold Medals are only given to the top 500 schools in the United States. This year there were 19,411 high schools that were eligible for the award.”

The school has been steadily rising in the rankings over the past three years, being ranked 461 two years ago and 315 last year. Now, with a ranking of 234, the school is now in the top one percent of high schools in the report.

“Well, it’s national recognition of the students’ performance at Lovejoy High School,” principal Gavan Goodrich said. “So, to have national recognition of the hard work of the students and the work of the teachers and to have an outside source recognizing us for that work I think is really special, and I’m very proud of the recognition.”

The ranking is calculated using three main categories that deal with student performance based on demographics and student test scores in rigorous courses such as AP.

“The researchers determine if a high school meets the criteria in each important category of student performance,” Muizers said. “Is the high school performing better than statistically expected given the percentage of economically disadvantaged students? Are traditionally lower performing students performing better than their peers in other districts? Is the school producing the best college-level achievement for the highest percentage of the students?”

According to these rankings, the school is performing very well.

“Lovejoy ISD has a low percentage of economically disadvantaged students which means that although our performance is expected to be high, LHS surpasses the high expectations,” Muizers said. “This measure is important to ensure that schools are not merely performing where the demographics of the school would guarantee.”

From a college-level standpoint, the school is also doing nicely.

“The students in Lovejoy are demonstrating the Lovejoy Graduate Profile by being Open to the Challenges of Learning when they take the most rigorous courses available and they are demonstrating that they are Intellectually Equipped when all students enrolled in an AP course test in May and do very well,” Muizers said. “This measure is important as high schools are expected to prepare students for the academic rigor of college.”

The ranking may also have an impact on the school’s name nationally.

“As far as national ranking and prestige, our students work very hard, and they take a lot of challenging courses, rigorous courses, and we know that that is good for them as they grow and develop and prepare to get into the college of their choice,” Goodrich said. “But, it’s also getting them ready to take college courses while they’re in high school so that when they’re in college, they’re not having a steep climb at all, but it’s just a straight pathway to success in college. So the College Board says that if you take AP courses in high school, you will have more success in college than if you don’t take AP courses. So that’s what we’ve been talking about from the very beginning, so it’s a validation of the work we’ve been doing and the fact that you get recognized as one of the top high schools in the country, the top one percent of the high schools in the country for the work you do; it makes you feel good.”

The ranking may end up signifying further hope for the school’s future.

“I think that there is still a lot of potential left in the system,” Goodrich said. “We continue to have more enrollment and we continue to have students do really good work and have better performance on AP. We’re always going to push to get the most out of our system, and I think that at Lovejoy, there are a lot of strong students, and we just want to allow them to do the best they possibly can, and if you get recognition in the end, that’s great. It’s more about the work that they do than the recognition.”

For more information about the ranking process, visithttp://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/2014/04/21/how-us-news-calculated-the-2014-best-high-schools-rankings