Billings' High School Graduations: Above Average

I like to look over the lists of kids in the Gazette, graduating from the four local high schools, "provided all academic requirements have been met," as they say in the fine print at the top of the newspaper page.

It seems that West and Senior graduate about the same number, around 400, while Skyview is a little over 300. There seemed to be some discrepancy in the number of graduates with honors until I found that West and Senior use the same classification, going down to 3.25 GPA, or B+, and about 33% of the graduating classes received some form of honors, while Skyview cut off the honors at 3.5 GPA, on the cusp of A-, so that only 19% of the graduates received honors, though the number inducted into the National Honor Society (NHS) was about the same for all three public high schools.

Billings Central Catholic High School had 9 kids out of a total of 85 with a 4.0 GPA, with one selected as valedictorian and the others as co-salutatorians. Wow. About half of the graduates had GPAs worthy of honors.

I thought it was interesting that there wasn't a very close correlation of GPA and NHS: in other words, some of those with honors were not inducted into the NHS, perhaps it is a voluntary selection, and some without honors were selected or inducted into the NHS.

It looks to me as if we are not quite in the same category as Garrison Keillor's mythical Lake Woebegone, where the "children are all above average," but we seem to be getting closer, especially judging by the increasing number of kids with honors of some sort. I wondered if a B is the new C.