Decatur High had its biggest commencement ceremony ever this week. Decaturish reports that the Class of 2026 numbered just under 500 students, larger than any cohort that has come through the school. City Schools of Decatur put the net weighted GPA average at 3.7, which is the kind of number that gets shared at every dinner table in town for the next month.
A bigger graduating class is also a useful barometer for what is happening to the small four-square-mile city around the high school. Decatur has been one of the more sought-after addresses in the metro for years now, with the school system as the gravitational center of that pull. Five hundred seniors is a lot to send into the world out of a single building, and the next reasonable question is what the freshman class behind them looks like, since that is a leading indicator of where the system, and the city's housing market, head next.
