The Largest High School in Every State

The biggest high school in the country sits in New York, and it is not close to a small building. Brooklyn Technical High enrolls 5,848 students, more than four times the size of the largest high school in Vermont. That gap, between the busiest and the quietest state-leaders, is the real story in this data. The largest high school in a state is one of the cleaner proxies for how that state grew and where it put its people.

Brooklyn Technical High By Beyond My Ken - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24704126

Below is the largest brick-and-mortar, non-charter, comprehensive high school in each state and the District of Columbia, by enrollment, using NCES Common Core of Data for the 2024-25 school year. Comprehensive means a standard grades 9 to 12 school, so virtual charters, magnet exam schools that report unusual grade spans, and specialized programs are not the comparison here. If you want the national ranking that ignores state lines, that lives in the companion piece on the largest public high schools in America, ranked.

The Largest High School in Each State, 2024-25

1. Alabama: Hoover High, Hoover, 2,919
2. Alaska: West High, Anchorage, 1,702
3. Arizona: Hamilton High, Chandler, 3,444
4. Arkansas: Bentonville High, Bentonville, 3,579
5. California: Eleanor Roosevelt High, Eastvale, 4,353
6. Colorado: Cherry Creek High, Greenwood Village, 3,852
7. Connecticut: Danbury High, Danbury, 3,612
8. Delaware: Caesar Rodney High, Camden, 2,254
9. District of Columbia: Jackson-Reed High, Washington, 1,855
10. Florida: Cypress Bay High, Weston, 4,579
11. Georgia: Brookwood High, Snellville, 3,803
12. Hawaii: James Campbell High, Ewa Beach, 2,890
13. Idaho: Mountain View High, Meridian, 2,463
14. Illinois: Adlai E. Stevenson High, Lincolnshire, 4,758
15. Indiana: Carmel High, Carmel, 5,239
16. Iowa: Lincoln High, Des Moines, 2,364
17. Kansas: East High, Wichita, 2,435
18. Kentucky: Lafayette High, Lexington, 2,370
19. Louisiana: Denham Springs High, Denham Springs, 2,385
20. Maine: Lewiston High, Lewiston, 1,709
21. Maryland: Montgomery Blair High, Silver Spring, 3,266
22. Massachusetts: Brockton High, Brockton, 3,598
23. Michigan: Cass Technical High, Detroit, 2,493
24. Minnesota: Wayzata High, Plymouth, 3,781
25. Mississippi: Tupelo High, Tupelo, 2,123
26. Missouri: Blue Springs High, Blue Springs, 2,429
27. Montana: Billings West High, Billings, 2,115
28. Nebraska: Grand Island Senior High, Grand Island, 2,696
29. Nevada: Desert Oasis High, Las Vegas, 3,300
30. New Hampshire: Nashua High School South, Nashua, 1,686
31. New Jersey: Passaic County Technical Institute, Wayne, 3,565
32. New Mexico: Cleveland High, Rio Rancho, 2,596
33. New York: Brooklyn Technical High, Brooklyn, 5,848
34. North Carolina: Myers Park High, Charlotte, 3,225
35. North Dakota: Legacy High, Bismarck, 1,419
36. Ohio: William Mason High, Mason, 3,435
37. Oklahoma: Broken Arrow High, Broken Arrow, 4,802
38. Oregon: David Douglas High, Portland, 2,756
39. Pennsylvania: Reading Senior High, Reading, 4,879
40. Rhode Island: East Providence High, East Providence, 1,691
41. South Carolina: Dorman High, Roebuck, 3,920
42. South Dakota: Central High, Rapid City, 1,998
43. Tennessee: Collierville High, Collierville, 2,946
44. Texas: Conroe High, Conroe, 5,252
45. Utah: Cedar Valley High, Eagle Mountain, 3,300
46. Virginia: Alexandria City High, Alexandria, 4,655
47. Vermont: Champlain Valley Union High, Hinesburg, 1,251
48. Washington: Chiawana Senior High, Pasco, 3,127
49. West Virginia: Morgantown High, Morgantown, 1,754
50. Wisconsin: Middleton High, Middleton, 2,303
51. Wyoming: Kelly Walsh High, Casper, 2,002

Listed alphabetically by state. Enrollment figures are total student head counts from NCES SY 2024-25; school cities follow the address NCES has on file, which is sometimes the mailing town rather than the larger metro everyone names.

What the Numbers Show

The top of the list is a who's-who of fast-growing metros. Brooklyn Technical leads everyone at 5,848, helped by being a single exam-magnet high school drawing from an entire borough rather than one neighborhood attendance zone. Right behind it, six state-leaders clear 4,700 students: Conroe in Texas at 5,252, Carmel in Indiana at 5,239, Reading in Pennsylvania at 4,879, Broken Arrow in Oklahoma at 4,802, and Stevenson in Illinois at 4,758. Three of those, Conroe, Carmel, and Broken Arrow, are classic high-growth suburbs that kept funneling new families into one enormous campus instead of splitting into multiple smaller schools.

That last point is worth sitting with, because school size is partly a population story and partly a policy choice. Two districts with the same number of teenagers can land in very different spots on this list depending on whether they build one 4,000-student megaschool or four 1,000-student ones. The states near the top tend to favor the big-campus model, often because a single high school is cheaper to staff and run than several, and because community identity gets attached to one football team and one name.

The bottom of the list is just as consistent. The smallest state-leaders are in small and rural states: Champlain Valley Union in Vermont at 1,251, Legacy in North Dakota at 1,419, and Jackson-Reed in the District of Columbia at 1,855, where the District simply does not have a large enough single attendance zone to build something bigger. South Dakota's Central High in Rapid City tops out at 1,998, and Wyoming's Kelly Walsh at 2,002. In these places, the largest high school in the entire state is smaller than a single grade level at Brooklyn Tech is large.

Put the two ends together and the pattern is clean. Sunbelt growth states and big-suburb states near major metros produce 4,000-plus flagships. Rural and small-population states top out somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000, even at their biggest single school. The largest high school in a state is, in effect, a readout of how concentrated that state's school-age population is and how its districts chose to organize it.

The middle of the list is more crowded than the extremes, and it is where the suburb-versus-city distinction shows up. A lot of these leaders sit in the 3,000 to 4,000 band: Brookwood in Georgia at 3,803, Wayzata in Minnesota at 3,781, Cherry Creek in Colorado at 3,852, Dorman in South Carolina at 3,920. Almost all of them are well-off suburban districts on the edge of a major metro, the kind of place where a single large high school anchors the town. The big-city leaders read differently. Cass Technical in Detroit at 2,493 and Lafayette in Lexington at 2,370 rank large by their state's standard but stay modest next to the suburban giants, because dense cities tend to spread their teenagers across many smaller neighborhood schools rather than one campus. The biggest single high schools in America are mostly a suburban phenomenon, not an urban one, with exam magnets like Brooklyn Tech as the standout exception.

How to Read This List

A few honest caveats, because enrollment data is messier than a clean ranking suggests. NCES head counts are self-reported by schools and reflect a single point-in-time count, so a campus at 4,353 one year may report 4,200 or 4,500 the next without anything real changing on the ground. The exclusion of charters and virtual schools matters too: in a handful of states the literal largest school by raw enrollment is a statewide online charter with tens of thousands of names on its rolls, which is why those do not appear here. This list is comprehensive neighborhood and magnet high schools, the kind of building a student actually walks into every morning.

If you are using these figures to size up a school, the headcount is only the starting point. A 4,000-student campus and a 1,400-student campus are different experiences, but bigger is neither automatically better nor worse. The thing to check is the student-to-teacher ratio and the course catalog, not the raw number on the front of the brochure. A large school can offer more advanced courses, more sports, and more clubs simply because it has the bodies to fill them, while a small one can offer a kid the chance to not be a number. You can pull enrollment, ratio, and demographics for any of these schools, and every other public school in the state, from the individual school pages on this site.

If you want to compare against the all-state ranking rather than state-by-state, the companion list of the largest public high schools in America ranks the same kind of schools head to head across the whole country.

Data note: enrollment figures are total student counts from the NCES Common Core of Data, SY 2024-25, limited to brick-and-mortar, non-charter, comprehensive high schools serving roughly grades 9 to 12.

Sources
NCES: Common Core of Data, Public School Data and Reports (SY 2024-25 enrollment)
NCES: ELSI, Elementary/Secondary Information System (school-level enrollment tables)