page_title: Prince George's County Public Schools
section_title: High schools
hierarchical_section_title: Prince George's County Public Schools / List of schools / High schools
caption_attribution_description: English: Landscape photo of Northwestern High School, in Hyattsville, Maryland USA, looking towards the main entrance of the C-Building, with Buildings B/G and A, in the background.
context_page_description: Prince George's County Public Schools is a large public school district administered by the government of Prince George's County, Maryland, United States, and is overseen by the Maryland State Department of Education. The school system is headquartered in Upper Marlboro and the district serves Prince George's County. The district is headed by Monica Goldson and a 14-member Board of Education.
  With 130,814 students enrolled for the 2017–2018 school year, the Prince George's County Public Schools system is the second largest school district in the state of Maryland; the third largest school district in both the Washington Metropolitan Area and Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area, after Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland; and it is one of the top 25 largest school districts in the nation. PGCPS operates 208 schools and special centers which include: 123 elementary schools, 24 middle schools, 23 high schools, and 12 academies. The school system also operates 9 special centers, 2 vocational centers, 3 alternative schools, 8 public charter schools, and the Howard B.
context_section_description: All high schools in Prince George's County operate with a "comprehensive" model as their base, with the exception of the new Academy of Health Sciences at Prince George's Community College, which is a middle college program. All students are assigned to a high school based on an attendance area.
  Magnet Programs operate as a "School-Within-A-School" model, where the magnet serves as an alternative program---in addition to the main comprehensive program---and students from outside the regular attendance area of the high school are enrolled and accepted into the magnet, either through continuity (automatic continuation from a middle school magnet program to the high school level equivalent) or more commonly, through a Magnet Lottery, in which students apply for a magnet program and are granted acceptance through a random drawing. Enrollment into the Center for the Visual and Performing Arts is through audition only.
  Several high schools have also implemented a Smaller Learning Community model, where they offer anywhere from two or more Academy Programs, which effectively breaks a school down into several smaller schools within the school, by allowing students to essentially declare a major (such as a student attending a college or university) through career academies such as "Arts, Media, and Communication" or the "National Academy of Finance," for example.
  All high schools within PGCPS operate on a staggered school day schedule, where some high schools start as early as 7:45am and end as early as 2:25pm, and other high schools start as late as 9:30am and end as late as 4:10pm. All high schools operate on an alternating A/B-day block scheduling system, where one group of classes are taken on "A-Days" and a different group of classes are taken on "B-Days," and the cycle repeats. Most high schools have between three and four lunch shifts, depending on enrollment and eating accommodations. The only exceptions are Eleanor Roosevelt High School — which has adopted a modified hybrid block schedule in which both traditional single period courses and double period (block schedule) courses are integrated — and the Academy of Health Science at Prince George's Community College.
caption: Northwestern High School
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2013:05:23 17:13:02", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4065", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2592", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1141"}