Summary:
ZIP code 46303 — Cedar Lake, Indiana — is served by exactly one public high school: Hanover Central High School, a grades 9–12 building with 857 students that belongs to the single-high-school Hanover Community School Corp. Because there is only one high school here, there is no local peer group to compare against; the meaningful benchmarks are the school's own three-year history and Indiana state averages.
By state standards, this is a strong school. It ranks 67th out of 415 Indiana high schools in 2025–26 — the 84th percentile, or top roughly 16% statewide — earning 4 stars. That follows a one-year dip to 167th of 429 (3 stars) in 2024–25, which was fully reversed. SAT Evidence-based Reading & Writing proficiency was 66.38% versus the state's 51.9%, and Mathematics was 36.6% versus 25.6%. The graduation rate is 96.9%, well above Indiana's 89.7%, and chronic absenteeism is 14.4%, better than the state's 16.7%. Notably, the district's own absenteeism rate is lower at 11.0%, which suggests attendance slips as students move into high school.
The clearest growth story is Mathematics, where proficiency rose 5.1 points year over year while the state figure stayed essentially flat — widening the school's edge over the state from +6.2 to +11.0 points. Biology climbed from 30.75% to 43.14%; no state comparison is available for 2025–26, so whether the previous gap closed cannot be determined. Reading remains the school's strongest subject, sitting roughly 30 points above math. Context: 17.15% of students qualify for free/reduced lunch, per-student spending is $12,091, and the student–teacher ratio is 17.8, implying about 48 teachers. Overall, parents should see a top-quintile school whose main opportunity area is math.
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