The High Schools of Washington County
Ten public high schools serve the county, and three of them are not conventional high schools at all. Where each one is, which serve rural communities on a different model, and what distinguishes them.
Washington County has ten public high schools. Six are conventional comprehensive high schools in the main population centers, two serve rural communities on a different grade model, and two are specialized rather than comprehensive. Knowing which is which saves a good deal of confusion when you are comparing them.
Remember that high school here is grades 10 through 12. Ninth graders are at middle schools, which is not what most families expect.
The comprehensive high schools
Dixie High School, St. George. One of the oldest in the county, and the school that kept the historic regional name after the local university dropped it.
Pine View High School, St. George. Serves the northeastern side of the city.
Snow Canyon High School, St. George. On the western side, toward Santa Clara and Ivins and the state park it takes its name from.
Desert Hills High School, St. George. Serves the southeastern part of the city.
Crimson Cliffs High School, Washington. Opened to absorb the growth in Washington City and the Washington Fields area, and the most recent addition to the comprehensive group.
Hurricane High School, Hurricane. Serves Hurricane, La Verkin, Toquerville and the eastern end of the county toward Zion.
Between them these six cover the great majority of students. Which one an address feeds into is a district question and one that changes as boundaries are redrawn — and under open enrollment it is a default rather than a fixed assignment.
The rural schools, on a different model
Enterprise High School, Enterprise, and Water Canyon High School, Hildale, both run grades 7 through 12 on a single campus. Their communities are too small to support the county's four-tier structure, so those students go through secondary school in one building rather than three.
Water Canyon has an unusual history: the school closed in 2001 and reopened in the autumn of 2014 after the district repurchased the property, and it serves a community with a distinctive history of its own on the Utah-Arizona line.
The two that are not comprehensive high schools
This is where comparisons go wrong, because both appear in lists and rankings alongside the others while doing something entirely different.
Millcreek High School, St. George, is the district's alternative high school. It exists for students for whom a large comprehensive campus is not working — because of scheduling, employment, credit recovery or circumstances that make a conventional timetable impractical. Judging it against Desert Hills on a ratings site is a category error.
Career Tech High School, St. George, is built around career and technical education, pairing academic requirements with trade and technical training.
There is also a statewide online option available to district students, which is a genuine alternative for some families rather than only an emergency measure.
Comparing them sensibly
A note worth making, because the temptation is strong. National ratings sites score these schools on test data and demographics, and they routinely mis-categorize the alternative and technical schools, mislabel the district's grade tiers, and lag behind boundary changes.
The more useful comparisons are the ones those sites cannot make: how far it is from your house, which programs and activities your child actually wants, whether the campus is at capacity, and — given open enrollment — whether you can get in at all. Visiting is worth more than any score.
Beyond the district there are charter and private options, including a performing-arts charter and several K-12 alternatives.
Frequently asked questions
How many high schools are in St. George, Utah?
Within St. George itself there are four comprehensive high schools — Dixie, Pine View, Snow Canyon and Desert Hills — plus the district's alternative school, Millcreek, and its career and technical school. Across Washington County as a whole there are ten public high schools, adding Crimson Cliffs in Washington City, Hurricane High in Hurricane, and the two rural schools at Enterprise and Hildale that run grades 7 through 12 together. Charter high schools operate separately from the district and are not counted in that total.
Why is ninth grade not in high school in Washington County?
Because the district uses a four-tier structure rather than the usual three. Elementary runs through fifth grade, intermediate covers sixth and seventh, middle covers eighth and ninth, and high school is tenth through twelfth. Ninth graders therefore attend a middle school campus. For families moving from a state where ninth grade is the freshman year of a four-year high school, this changes where a fourteen-year-old spends the day, which building their sports and activities are attached to, and how course planning toward graduation is sequenced. Two small schools at the far ends of the county are set up differently, putting all of secondary school on one campus.
Which St. George high school is the best?
There is no defensible single answer, and the ratings sites that offer one are usually comparing schools that are not comparable — an alternative high school and a technical high school will always score poorly against comprehensive campuses on metrics designed for comprehensive campuses. The six comprehensive schools serve different parts of a growing county and are more alike than different in what they offer. The questions worth asking instead are practical: what is the commute, does the school have the program or activity your child cares about, is it near capacity, and can you get a place there under open enrollment.