Summary
Achieve Online is a small alternative online public high school in Colorado Springs School District 11, serving 342 students in grades 6 through 12 from the Afton Way campus. The school serves a student body with significant economic need, as about 64% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and it offers a flexible, non-traditional learning model for families seeking an alternative to the traditional classroom.
Compared with nearby schools, Achieve Online sits in the middle of a challenging cluster. It ranks 281st out of 338 Colorado high schools (17th percentile), placing it behind Doherty High School and Palmer High School but ahead of Mitchell High School, The Bijou School, and Nikola Tesla Education Opportunity Center. Impressively, it outperforms most of its alternative-school peers on key measures: its 70.3% graduation rate beats Nikola Tesla (65.7%), Bijou (56.7%), and Eastlake (41.3%), while its 3.8% dropout rate and 47.3% chronic absenteeism rate are far better than those same neighboring programs. Most striking is the contrast with Odyssey Early College and Career Options, which shares the same address but ranks among the top high schools in the state—a powerful reminder that program quality, not location, drives outcomes.
Academically, Achieve Online shows an uneven profile. Reading and writing is a relative bright spot: 10th-grade PSAT proficiency reached 54%, matching Doherty and ahead of Palmer (51%) and Mitchell (31%). However, 9th-grade PSAT reading/writing drops to 35%, and 11th-grade SAT reading/writing is only 40%. Science proficiency sits at a very low 12.5%, and the school reports no math assessment data at all, making it impossible to fully evaluate student readiness in that subject. The school's rank history shows a decade of stagnation, with a brief improvement to the 34th percentile in 2023-2024 that did not hold. For parents considering this option, Achieve Online offers a more functional alternative than some nearby programs, but the overall academic performance remains well below state and district averages, and the recent spike in chronic absenteeism is a red flag for student engagement.
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