Indian Hills High School is a comprehensive four-year public high school serving students in ninth through twelfth grades, located in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. The school is a part of the Ramapo Indian Hills Regional High School District, serving students from Franklin Lakes, Oakland and Wyckoff. The high school is located in Oakland. Ramapo High School is the other high school in the district. Students from the three feeder districts may make the choice of which high school to attend by February of the year that they are in eighth grade.
As of the 2021–22 school year, the school had an enrollment of 839 students and 87.7 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 9.6:1. There were 22 students (2.6% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and none eligible for reduced-cost lunch.
History
In less than a decade after Ramapo High School opened, district enrollment rose from 650 to more than 2,000, ultimately requiring the school to operate with double sessions. Constructed to alleviate the overcrowding at a cost of $3 million (equivalent to $ million in ), the school opened in September 1964 serving 575 students in grades 9-11 from Oakland and the portions of Franklin Lakes closest to the new school, while students from Wyckoff and the rest of Franklin Lakes attended Ramapo High School.
In 1999, the district allowed students from Franklin Lakes to choose which high school to attend, ending the policy under which students in the eastern half of Franklin Lakes were required to attend Ramapo High School while those in the borough's western half were assigned to Indian Hills High School. Oakland students were generally assigned to Indian Hills while Wyckoff residents could select which school to attend.
Awards, recognition and rankings
The school was the 60th-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 43rd in the state of 328 schools in 2012, after being ranked 35th in 2010 out of 322 schools listed. The magazine ranked the school 40th in 2008 out of 316 schools. The school was ranked 36th in the magazine's September 2006 issue, which included 316 schools across the state. Schooldigger.com ranked the school 89th out of 381 public high schools statewide in its 2011 rankings (an increase of 5 positions from the 2010 ranking) which were based on the combined percentage of students classified as proficient or above proficient on the mathematics (86.9%) and language arts literacy (97.2%) 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 56th in New Jersey and 1,647 nationwide.
The Indian Hills Academic Decathlon Team, coached by Lisa Acquaire from 1995-2009, represented New Jersey in the National Competition in 2001 (Anchorage, AK), 2006 (San Antonio, TX), and 2007 (Honolulu, HI). At the competition in Alaska, the Indian Hills Team was awarded Rookie of the Year and member Brent Morris earned a medal for his overall score that placed him as the third highest scoring decathlete at his level. In 2010, under coach Michael Catelli, the team ranked second in the state and the 2012 team finishing third in the statewide competition. In 2014 the team competed in the online national competition and was ranked second in the nation in their division.