From the Roanoke County Public Schools website:

Hidden Valley High School and Cave Spring High School have been ranked among the top 50 high schools in Virginia according to the 4th edition of the Best High Schools ranking by U.S. News. Hidden Valley H.S. was ranked 27th in Virginia (750th nationally) and Cave Spring H.S. was ranked 33rd (1,521st nationally). Both schools earned silver medals.

While the previous U.S. News high school rankings published in December 2009 included information on 1,800 schools, the 2012 rankings include data on nearly 22,000 public high schools from 49 states and the District of Columbia. (Nebraska did not report enough data to be included in the rankings.)

U.S. News partnered with the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research (AIR), which implemented U.S. News’s rankings methodology. To determine the Best High Schools national rankings, schools were first analyzed at the state level in terms of how well students in each school performed on state assessments, taking into account the test scores of disadvantaged students (low-income, Hispanic, and black), who tend to score lower on tests.

High schools that made it through this analysis were then eligible to be ranked nationally, in terms of college readiness. U.S. News determines the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work by analyzing student success in Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, both of which include college-level courses. U.S. News awarded more than 4,850 gold, silver, and bronze medals to the top-performing schools.

Read Hidden Valley’s report here and Cave Spring’s report here.