Summary
Southern Alamance High is a large traditional public high school in Graham, NC, serving about 1,148 students in grades 9–12 as part of the Alamance-Burlington Schools district. Over the past several years, the school's statewide ranking has slipped from the upper half of North Carolina high schools (roughly the 57th percentile in 2018–2019) to the lower third today — 464th out of 662 schools for 2025–2026, putting it in the 30th percentile. That places it behind nearby Southeast Alamance High, Western Alamance High, and Eastern Alamance High in the latest rankings, though ahead of Walter M Williams High, Graham High, and Hugh M Cummings High.
Parents will find a clear bright spot in graduation: 90.5% of Southern Alamance seniors graduate, which beats the district rate of 85.9% and the state average of 88.8%, and ties with Eastern Alamance for the best rate among traditional high schools in the district. The school also shows a relative strength in biology, where 54.0% of students score proficient — ahead of Western, Eastern, Williams, and Cummings — and math scores are not uniformly discouraging. Math I proficiency jumped from about 20% to 39% in one year, and biology and English II also improved. In terms of the student body, about half of Southern's students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch; that makes the school noticeably less economically isolated than several neighboring high schools, which report eligibility rates near 99%.
The bigger challenges are attendance and consistency. Chronic absenteeism stands at 43.6% of students — well above the district's 30.0% and nearly double the state rate of 24.2%. While this has improved sharply from 68.7% a few years ago, it remains far higher than the 20.5% at Southeast Alamance, and it likely helps explain why proficiency on end-of-course exams in English II, Math I, and Math III trails both district and state averages, with achievement sitting in the bottom quartile for nearly every student subgroup. The comparison with Southeast Alamance is striking: the two schools are similar in size, about five miles apart, and serve comparable student populations, yet Southeast outscores Southern by double digits on every core subject and has less than half the chronic absenteeism — even though Southern Alamance posts the higher graduation rate.
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