River Dell High School is a four-year comprehensive regional public high school, part of the River Dell Regional School District, which is shared with the neighboring communities of Oradell and River Edge in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Located in Oradell, River Dell High School has been a four-year high school since 1994, and is accredited by the New Jersey Department of Education.
As of the 2021–22 school year, the school had an enrollment of 999 students and 90.4 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 11.1:1. There were 9 students (0.9% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and 5 (0.5% of students) eligible for reduced-cost lunch.
History
President Ronald Reagan spoke at the high school in June 1984, where he advocated on behalf of a drinking age of 21 as a minimum standard.
Awards, recognition and rankings
During the 1997–98 school year, River Dell High School was recognized with the National Blue Ribbon School Award of Excellence by the United States Department of Education, the highest award an American school can receive.
The school was the 31st-ranked public high school in New Jersey out of 339 schools statewide in New Jersey Monthly magazine's September 2014 cover story on the state's "Top Public High Schools", using a new ranking methodology. The school had been ranked 104th in the state of 328 schools in 2012, after being ranked 27th in 2010 out of 322 schools listed. The magazine ranked the school 37th in 2008 out of 316 schools. Schooldigger.com ranked the school tied for 113th out of 381 public high schools statewide in its 2011 rankings (an increase of 16 positions from the 2010 ranking) which were based on the combined percentage of students classified as proficient or above proficient on the mathematics (87.5%) and language arts literacy (94.40%) components of the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA).
In the 2011 "Ranking America's High Schools" issue by The Washington Post, the school was ranked 63rd in New Jersey and 1,866th nationwide.
In its 2013 report on "America's Best High Schools", The Daily Beast ranked the school 819th in the nation among participating public high schools and 60th among schools in New Jersey.
Curriculum
River Dell High School offers students a wide variety of college preparation, honors, and Advanced Placement courses. River Dell offers a Junior MBA program in which students are eligible to earn a scholarship after taking five business-related courses and completing a project if they intend to major in business in college.
River Dell requires every student to take three years of mathematics, two years of foreign language (French, Spanish, Italian, or Mandarin Chinese), four years of English, three years of science and three years of history. Concurrently, as requirement by the state of New Jersey, students must fulfill 5 credits in business, technology, and life skills related classes. The school offers 13 Advanced Placement courses, ranging from Chemistry, to Art Portfolio, a senior internship and mentor ship where students are allowed to get a hands on feel for various professions, and various Syracuse University Project Advance (SUPA) offering a student a chance to earn college credits.
River Dell is based on a day with six 56-minute periods on a four-day rotating bell schedule. Each student is given their own laptop to use for classwork both for school and home use. The school has a large number of electives and courses.
Facilities and programs
Construction was completed as the result of a 2003 referendum that approved a $28.9 million school renovation project. Many of the facilities in the school were inaccessible during the construction. Following the completion of the construction in the spring of 2007, the school had a new wing, which included six science and eight general classrooms, two music rooms, and two gymnasiums. Enhancements to the library, art rooms, technology and computer labs, and athletic fields were also included.
Starting with the class of 2009, each freshman has received a hybrid tablet PC–notebook computer for use during their four years of high school. In June before the 2008–09 school year, the Board of Education voted to buy 1,100 HP laptops so that every student in all four classes could use a new laptop. These replaced the former Tablet PCs that were given out with a traditional laptop computer.