Summary:
Zip code 35022 is home to just one high school, Bessemer City High School, a public school in Bessemer, Alabama, serving grades 9 through 12 with an enrollment of 760 students.
For parents considering this area, the most important takeaway is that Bessemer City High School faces significant academic challenges, though there are signs of recent improvement. The school’s 11th-grade proficiency rates are well below state averages across all subjects—just 5.39% in math, 9.36% in science, and 8.59% in English, compared to state rates of 27.21%, 36.17%, and 33.73%, respectively. However, these numbers represent a substantial year-over-year gain, with math proficiency quadrupling, science nearly doubling, and English more than doubling from the prior year. The school’s state ranking has been volatile, swinging from the 16th percentile in 2023-2024 to the 2nd percentile in 2024-2025, before recovering to the 7th percentile in 2025-2026. A major concern is chronic absenteeism, which sits at 41.7%—nearly double the district rate and more than 3.5 times the state average. The school also serves a high-need population, with nearly 80% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch.
On a more positive note, the graduation rate of 85.5% is only 6 points below the state average, suggesting that students are being supported to completion despite academic struggles. The student-teacher ratio is 21.7:1, and per-student spending was $9,771 in 2018-2019. Since Bessemer City High School is the only high school in the Bessemer City district, all district-level metrics mirror the school’s performance exactly. There are no other high schools in the immediate zip code for comparison, so parents should evaluate this school against state benchmarks, where it consistently falls short—though the recent upward trend in test scores offers a glimmer of hope for future improvement.
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