Prior to the establishment of Catalina Foothills, some district students attended high school in Tucson Unified School District and the rest primarily in the Amphitheater district. The establishment of Catalina Foothills was postponed several decades due to the ability of district students to attend high school in neighboring school districts. As the population grew in the area, a large core of Catalina Foothills students attended Amphitheater High School in North Tucson, as the closer Canyon del Oro High School in Oro Valley was virtually closed to out-of-district students. As the Amphitheater district began to experience overcrowding, the need for a high school in the Catalina Foothills School District became apparent. Construction began in 1991 on a site centrally located in the district. The Catalina Foothills School Board had acquired the site in the late 1970s. The school opened to the ninth grade in 1992 when classes met at a district middle school. In 1993 campus was opened to ninth and tenth graders, and the first graduating class of Foothills High walked in late spring 1996.
Rankings
In 2006, Catalina Foothills had the state's second-highest percentage of students exceeding math, the third-highest percentage of students exceeding reading standards, and the ninth-highest percentage of student exceeding writing standards. Catalina Foothills has been ranked in the top 1.7% of high schools in the US. In 2014, the US News & World Report rankings of the top high schools ranked CFHS at number 754 out of 21,000 in the country, No. 10 in Arizona, and No. 3 in Tucson. In 2013, CFHS also ranked 245th amongst all high schools in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, although lost its rank in 2014. US News awarded the school a silver medal in its rankings survey. Newsweek ranked CFHS 310 out of the top 500 public high schools in the US in its 2016 ranking. Newsweeks list placed CFHS 2nd in Tucson and 6th out of the 11 Arizona high schools.
Activities
The Chess Team has won the High School National Championship in four of the last ten years, as well as six other national championships. The Chess Team also has won the AIA State High School Championship nine times out of the last ten years
The Catalina Foothills "Blue" Science Olympiad team has won state championships a total of eight times, in 2006 and then consecutively from 2008-2014.
The Catalina Foothills Marching Band consists of around 240 students annually and has an international reputation. In the 2009-2010 school year, the band participated in the Fiesta Bowl parade and competition, placing fourth out of seven competing bands in the country. In both 2006 and 2019, the Falcon band represented Arizona at the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Soon after performing on live television in 2006, the Chinese-American Cultural Bridge Center, on behalf of the Olympic International Festival Committee, invited the band to perform in a youth festival in China a month before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing during the summer of 2008. In the summer of 2012, the band traveled to the east coast of Australia for seven days, visiting local marching bands and experiencing local culture. In 2014 ten Falcons won Best One Act Play in the state, traveling to the International Thespian Festival in June 2015.
