@Synth as you are from the same general area as Phil, have you ever heard of Fairfield of Notre Dame?
Our research showed it was ranked #1 in diversity and ranked pretty high in athletics, but was near the bottom for academics.
Just looking for more information on how this guy was the valedictorian.
I don't know too much about it, but the majority of private/Catholic High Schools in CT kinda follow the national trend of them being sort of funnels for athletics, especially basketball like almost all Catholic High Schools in NYC/Boston. But at the same time, it is a private school, so the quality of teaching should be at least average, and Fairfield is a more well-off town because all of Fairfield County is (DSP isn't wrong about one area of CT mostly driving up taxes for everyone else, plus the addition of Hartford and New Haven -- CT isn't bad as long as you're not poor), so there should be higher pay for teachers and should attract more competition.
Like there's still a bunch of better private schools in the area, though. If you're going for academics and your parents want to shell out the money, you go to Fairfield Prep, which is probably one of the best private schools in the state.
The way I see it is they probably didn't want to put little Phillip into the Bridgeport public system, because Bridgeport is pretty fucking trash; it's really cleaned up in the past 5 years, but it's still got a ways to go. So Mama and Papa Burnell put their only child into the closest private school that wouldn't break the bank, which would be Notre Dame in Fairfield. Looking on Google maps, it's only like 5 miles from his parents' place, so they could more easily manage getting him to and from there. There's another Notre Dame in West Haven, but that's like 15-20 miles, so that's too big an ask for boomer parents, even though it's a much better school for academics.
So I'd say there was definitely less competition because it was an "athletics school", but since it was still private and in Fairfield, it should've had passable teachers. That doesn't necessarily say anything about the quality of students, though. I can recall meeting a handful of people who had gone to Notre Dame, but I can't remember if it was Fairfield or West Haven, so it's hard for me to really pull anything from my teenage years.
