Orange High

Orange High is a large, traditional public high school in Hillsborough, NC, serving 1,161 students in grades 9–12 and operating as part of Orange County Schools. For the 2025–2026 school year, Orange High ranks 277th out of 662 North Carolina high schools, placing it in the 58th percentile with a 3-star rating. That marks a strong recovery from its pandemic-era low of 395th in 2022–2023, though it remains below its pre-pandemic standing when the school ranked as high as 110th in 2017–2018. Perhaps most notably, Orange has recently become the higher-ranked traditional high school in its own district, surpassing Cedar Ridge High in overall state rank, graduation rate, math proficiency, and chronic absenteeism, even though the two schools serve very similar student populations.

Orange’s clearest academic strength is math. Its Math III proficiency rate of 80.8% is well above district and state averages and nearly matches East Chapel Hill High, a school with a considerably more affluent student body. Its Math I proficiency has also improved dramatically, jumping from 28% to 42.9% in a single year and moving Orange roughly in line with the state average. English II, by contrast, is the school’s biggest academic gap. At 67.2% proficiency, Orange trails both Chapel Hill High and East Chapel Hill High by about 16 percentage points, while its Biology proficiency of 62% sits below several nearby peers.

Looking ahead, two concerns stand out. Chronic absenteeism sits at 29.1%, meaning roughly one in four or five students misses significant school time. While that is better than many Durham comprehensive high schools, it is above the state average. Outcomes for English language learners, low-income students, and special education students also trail the rest of the school, with ELL proficiency dropping sharply in recent years. At the same time, student-teacher ratios jumped from 15.7 to 19.6 in one year, adding pressure on staffing. Orange is clearly improving and has genuine math strengths, but closing the English gap and supporting its highest-need students will be key to returning to its pre-pandemic ranking.