Best High Schools in Zip Code 28457

ZIP code 28457 contains one public high school, Heide Trask High, serving grades 9–12 in Rocky Point, North Carolina, as part of Pender County Schools. Since there is only one high school in this area, the summary below focuses on this school’s profile compared to district and state benchmarks.

Heide Trask High enrolls 732 students, and nearly all of them (99.59%) qualify for free/reduced-price lunch, making it a very high-poverty school. Its student-teacher ratio is 21.8:1, and per-student spending was $10,484 in 2018–19. The school currently holds a 1-star rating and ranks in the 18th percentile of North Carolina high schools after dropping sharply from the 34th percentile two years earlier. Academically, proficiency on End-of-Course exams is far below both the district and state averages in every subject. For example, 39.1% of students are proficient in Biology, 49.2% in English II, 26.8% in Math I, and 52.4% in Math III. The district, in contrast, performs around the state average, which makes Heide Trask High an outlier within an otherwise average district.

There are some positive takeaways. The school’s graduation rate is 92.0%, above the state’s 88.8% rate. Test scores also improved meaningfully from the prior year in all four subjects, with the largest gain in Biology (+16.1 percentage points). Still, the improvement comes from a very low starting point, and the gap to state averages remains large. Chronic absenteeism affects 25.1% of students, meaning one in four misses enough school to be considered chronically absent. For parents, this school shows a pattern of students persisting to graduation despite low academic proficiency in core subjects. The high poverty rate and chronic absenteeism are important context, but the main concern is that many students graduate without reaching proficiency in foundational coursework like Algebra I. Families considering this school should weigh its supportive graduation environment against the need for substantial academic intervention, especially in mathematics.