Verona High School is a four-year comprehensive community public high school, serving students in ninth through twelfth grade in Verona, in Essex County, New Jersey, United States, operating as the lone secondary school of the Verona Public Schools. The school has been accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Elementary and Secondary Schools since 1947. As of the 2021–22 school year, the school had an enrollment of 642 students and 54.6 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 11.8:1. There were 6 students (0.9% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and none eligible for reduced-cost lunch. The school mascot is the Verona Hillbilly, which reflected the remote, rural nature of the community. It was originally created in the 1950s and pictured with a bottle of moonshine and a shotgun. The mascot later was redesigned with a dog and a fishing pole due to concerns of school violence and under-age drinking. Awards, recognition and rankings Verona High School won the New Jersey Star School Award for the 1995–96 school year. The school won the New Jersey Best Practice Award in the 1995–96 school year for Citizenship / Tolerance in recognition of its program in Prejudice Reduction. In the 1997–98 school year, it received the Best Practice Award for Citizenship & Character Education in recognition of Teaching Responsibility Through Involvement. The school was the 56th-ranked public high school in New Jersey out of 339 schools statewide in New Jersey Monthly magazine's September 2014 cover story on the state's "Top Public High Schools", using a new ranking methodology. The school had been ranked 70th in the state of 328 schools in 2012, after being ranked 53rd in 2010 out of 322 schools listed. The magazine ranked the school 53rd in 2008 out of 316 schools. The school was ranked 47th in the magazine's September 2006 issue, which included 316 schools across the state. Schooldigger.com ranked the school tied for 133rd out of 381 public high schools statewide in its 2011 rankings (an increase of 33 positions from the 2010 ranking) which were based on the combined percentage of students classified as proficient or above proficient on the mathematics (83.7%) and language arts literacy (95.4%) components of the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA). In the 2011 "Ranking America's High Schools" issue by The Washington Post, the school was ranked 59th in New Jersey and 1,718th