High Schools in Sierra Unified

The two high schools in Sierra Unified serve grades 9–12: Sierra High enrolls 367 students, while Sierra Alternative High enrolls 10. The clearest current strength is Sierra High’s English language arts (ELA): in 2025–2026, 74% of students were proficient, 25 points above the state’s 49%. Its math proficiency was 34% and science was 35%, both below state results, so the area’s strongest finding is Sierra High’s exceptional ELA performance—not uniformly high results across subjects.

Sierra High stands out in current ELA and graduation results, while the schools’ 2024–2025 scores show that the Alternative school did better in math than its larger counterpart. That year, Sierra High’s ELA proficiency was 76%, compared with 36% at Sierra Alternative High—a 40-point difference. In math, Sierra Alternative High led, with 45% proficiency versus 40% at Sierra High, a 6-point gap. In 2025–2026, Sierra High’s graduation rate was 93%, above the state’s 88%; its dropout rate was 4%, below the state’s 8%. Sierra Alternative High’s graduation rate was 87%, just below the state, while its dropout rate was 7%, below the state. Its 2025–2026 school-level test scores are suppressed, so a current-year academic comparison between the schools is not available.

Sierra High’s results moved in different directions from 2024–2025 to 2025–2026: ELA fell 2 points, math fell 6 points, and science rose 9 points. Its advantage over the state in ELA narrowed from 28 points to 25; in math, it shifted from 2 points above the state to 4 points below, while its science gap narrowed from 7 points below to 1 point below. SchoolDigger’s statewide percentile for Sierra High eased from 76 in 2023–2024 to 72 in 2025–2026; Sierra Alternative High’s reported percentiles were 0 in 2016–2017, 47 in 2018–2019, and 61 in 2024–2025. For context, in 2024–2025 the schools’ student-teacher ratios were 16.9 at Sierra High and 5 at Sierra Alternative High; their free/reduced lunch eligible measures were 35% and 40%, respectively. These figures describe school characteristics and do not explain student results.