Lewisburg High School

NOT AS GOOD AS IT SHOULD BE.

The School Digger ratings are based on PSSA scores, and the Lewisburg students do get good PSSA scores. The problem is, the students enrolled at Lewisburg would get good PSSA scores wherever they went, and the good scores have led to an unwarranted complacency and self satisfaction in the administration and faculty.

Lewisburg is like a school in a high end suburban school district - you have the normal bright kids that you find everywhere, but added in are the kids of Bucknell faculty and the many Geisinger doctors who live in the area, two groups that raise their kids in culturally rich environments with ample stimulation. With so many bright students from great home environments, the scores will be fairly high. Put differently, standardized tests measure the family as much as the school, and Lewisburg is blessed with many highly educated families that surround their smart children with awesome out of school learning opportunities.

The school should be pushing all these bright kids to excellence and sending them on to the very best schools in the country, but mediocrity seems to be sufficient. There is little homework, and little effort made to push kids to prepare themselves for elite colleges. Taking classes at Bucknell used to be an option for the brighter kids, but the school has adopted a schedule that makes that very difficult for day time classes. On the other hand, at least, this isn't a district where kids who get excellent grades are ostracized based solely on being demonstrably smart.

Year after year, the school's brightest graduates get turned down by the Ivies and Ivy equivalents (e.g., MIT, Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore). The school seems to not have a good reputation with elite college admission offices, and it has not had admission counselors who understand and can teach the complex strategies of elite school admission. I've seen kids who are college level athletes not have that used to their benefit in the admissions process, only to be told by the coach after the deny letter went out, "If I'd only known." The net is, if you want to send a child with the boards and grades and extracurriculars that warrant admission to Dartmouth/Williams/Stanford to Hamilton or Penn State, Lewisburg High is well suited to that.

It's not a bad school. It's a pretty good school, and clearly the best school in a 50 mile radius. It's just a bad school for really, really good students with big ambitions. If you have a normally bright child who likes playing sports but wouldn't make the team at a massive school like New Trier, might benefit from a very good anti-bullying program, would enjoy being around a student body that generally is made up of nice and smart kids, and would be happy to enroll at second choice type college, Lewisburg would be fine. If you yourself went to an elite school, have strong alumni ties to that school, and can take over the counseling and strategizing and preparation job yourself, Lewisburg might also be fine (its Ivy placements in recent decades seem to follow that model).

The frustration is seeing all these kids go out of high school and on to colleges (and lives) that aren't as good as they deserve. With administrators who understood that the world doesn't end at the state line, and teachers who are hired on credentials rather than ties to local power brokers, this could be one of the top five schools in the state. As it is, it's just a pretty good school, and that's a crying shame.