Original Research by School Decision on Sheridan High School
Sheridan High School sits within Englewood, a city with a defined center and varied neighborhoods. The civic life of Englewood concentrates at CityCenter, a transit-oriented development built on the site of a former mall. It holds the public library, city government, a museum, and a light rail station. The city’s major employers are healthcare institutions, headed by Swedish Medical Center and Craig Hospital, which together form a large hospital district in the northeast quadrant. The housing stock is varied. The northwest quadrant, near the downtown, has homes dating from the early 1900s. The southwest contains industrial and production facilities alongside newer homes. The Hampden Hills neighborhood, the newest and wealthiest part of the city, has a high concentration of apartment complexes. A free trolley connects the light rail station to the downtown, the medical district, and the civic center. The most significant recent redevelopment was the transformation of the former mall. The city was largely built up in a post-World War II boom, and most growth since has been infill and redevelopment of former commercial and industrial sites. The Sheridan School District itself did not have any recent changes of the kind that would directly affect families—such as a referendum or curriculum overhaul—that we could find in public reporting, so we left that topic out.
Sheridan High School is a regular public high school serving ninth through twelfth grades. The enrollment is small for its grade band. This is a school where a substantial share of students come from low-income households. The student body is predominantly Hispanic, with a sizable share of white students and smaller numbers of Black and Asian students. We looked for data on English learners and students with disabilities but did not find counts, so we cannot describe those populations.
State testing data for proficiency was not available in the information we were given, which is a notable gap for a high school. It may reflect the limitations of the data set rather than a lack of testing, but a parent may want to look into this further with the school to understand academic performance. Similarly, no graduation rate was included in our data, and we could not compare this school to other high schools in Arapahoe County on that measure. The comparison set that was possible—a look at districts in Arapahoe County—could not be completed because the key metrics were missing. This means we cannot place Sheridan High School’s academic results or chronic absenteeism relative to its neighbors.
What we can say is that Englewood itself is a place with a mix of old and new, a strong medical employment base, a walkable downtown centered on transit, and a housing market where rents and home values have seen a modest decline recently, consistent with a broader state trend. The school sits in a district that serves a community with these characteristics. The high school’s size is small, its student body is majority low-income and Hispanic, and its academic outcome data is absent from the record we have. For a family deciding where to live or enroll, that absence of state-tested performance and graduation data is the most significant piece of information here. It does not tell you whether the school is strong or weak; it tells you that the typical public measures are not available for this profile, which is something to investigate directly with the school or district office.
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