Niche, a website dedicated to assessing and ranking schools in the United States, has named Notre Dame de Sion the Best Catholic High School in the Kansas City area in its recently released 2017 Best Schools in America rankings for Catholic high schools. Sion also ranked the fifth best Catholic school in the state of Missouri, behind four St. Louis schools, and 65th best Catholic school in the nation.  

“I think that anytime we are recognized for our hard work and accomplishments it is an honor,” High School Division Head Natalie McDonough said. “It is great when our students and faculty can be acknowledged for all of the hard work that they do.”

This high ranking will be helpful for promoting our school and will help draw in more future students who didn’t know what our school is or how it would be a perfect fit for them, according to McDonough.

“I hope that this acknowledgement will get more people to look at our school,” McDonough said. “Even if it gets one or two people to actually come to our school then we can win them over with what goes on inside our school that makes it so special.”

Directly behind Sion in the ranking for Best Catholic High School in the Kansas City area was Rockhurst High School, followed by St. Thomas Aquinas coming in third and St. Teresa’s Academy ranking fourth.

The ranking was carried out by Niche, which is a website that evaluates every kindergarten through 12th grade school in the United States through analysis of public data and student and parent reviews and survey responses to produce easily comparable rankings, report cards and profiles for each school. The public data that Niche uses is from the National Center for Education Statistics, which includes data that is self-reported by schools. Niche is the largest website for researching both public and private schools from kindergarten through 12th grade, according to Niche documents.

Niche bases its ranking off of many factors. Thirty percent of the ranking comes from average SAT and ACT composite scores that are reported by students. Another 25 percent comes from the quality of colleges that students report considering or going on to attend and 15 percent comes from the percentage of seniors who go on to attend four-year colleges which is reported by NCES. The last 30 percent is factored in from student and parent surveys, student-teacher ratios and a student culture and diversity grade, which each weigh in at 10 percent of the rank, according to Niche documents.

Sion’s breakdown of the previously mentioned factors are as follows: a composite SAT score of 1270 and ACT score of 29 based off of 51 responses, a grade A top colleges score, 99 percent college enrollment, a grade B in culture and diversity, a 4.6 out of five in parent and student surveys on overall experiences with 18 responses and an 11-1 student-teacher ratio, according to Niche’s Best Catholic High Schools in the Kansas City area ranking information.

“I heard one of our 2007 alums speaking last week and she talked about how Sion is a school that helps young women to build confidence, drive, and empathy. I couldn’t agree more,” Assistant High School Division Head for Curriculum and Instruction Ellen Carmody said. “We’ve been doing a great job of this for over 100 years and it is nice to be recognized for it. With that said, I feel like the community at Sion knows that a good, holistic education isn’t about where you rank in a list – it’s about how you become the best person you can be and serve others and our world in the process.”