A recent report that said more than 50 percent of Panther Valley High School students drop out or transfer from the district was based on faulty information, according to school officials.

U.S. News and World Report published its annual EST High Schools rankings on April 25. The rankings looked at more than 22,000 schools across the country and gave gold, silver and bronze medals to schools that performed well based on state and federal data.The rankings were used in numerous local reports around the country.According to U.S. News, only 43 percent of the 2014-15 cohort, (students who enrolled in ninth grade at Panther Valley in 2011-12) ended up graduating within four years. The figures were based on the school's 2015 class.But district officials said they found a problem with the data used to rank their school, and the actual graduation rate for that class was 74.52.According to Superintendent Dennis Kergick, the rankings assumed there were 186 people in the cohort. They looked back and found there were actually only 106."Our numbers of the cohort were inflated to 186 - there's not a class of 186 in here," he said.The error apparently came from the district. Between 2011 and 2015, they changed the software they use to track student progress, the district's tech coordinator, Janet Fisher, said."I backtracked the data, and what happened is during that time we switched from one student info system to another," she said.The rate of 74.52 is still the lowest of the seven high schools in the Times News coverage area. However the rankings did give Panther Valley a college readiness score of 8.4, which was better than Palmerton and CCTI.Jim Thorpe, Weatherly, Pleasant Valley and Lehighton high schools were the only schools in the greater Carbon County Area that U.S. News gave a ranking. They each received a bronze medal.