Hazelwood West High School

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article may require cleanup.
More verifiable information on this school is needed. Guidelines and editing help are available.
See rationale on this article's talk page. This school based article is related to WikiProject Schools.

Hazelwood West High School is a public high school in the Hazelwood School District located in North St. Louis County, Missouri. Construction started in 1969, and finally finished in 1975. Its colors are red and black and its mascot is the wildcat. Students at West are required to wear I.D.'s which are attached to a red lanyard.

[edit] History

In the 1960’s the Hazelwood School District was growing by leaps and bounds. If the district did not build more high schools (and the fact that most other area schools were going to a 9th through 12th grade high school system), Hazelwood High School would have 9,000 students. It was then decided that Hazelwood would build two more high schools—calling them East, Central, and West.

Hazelwood West was opened in 1969 as a three-year junior high school (called Howdershell Jr. High) and was later expanded to include the three additional years of high school. During the 1970-71 school year (or at least until the spring break of 1971) Howdershell Jr. High was on sessions. The ninth grade went from 6:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and the 7th and 8th grade went from 1:00 p.m. to 7 p.m. This way the 9th graders could still be on freshmen teams and have practice time. The building opened as a six-year facility in 1975. This unique plan allowed the utilization of facilities for both schools at substantial savings. Although the high school started functioning in 1975, the construction started in the spring of 1974. This meant that for a year and a half construction surrounded the junior high facility. Given the ages of seventh and eighth graders meant extra watchful duties for the faculty. Add to this, the junior high never had a cafeteria, so the students ate lunch in their fourth period classroom. This as you can imagine really went over well with both students and faculty.

During the 1974-75 school year all three high schools went to school in what is now called Hazelwood Central. East and West Highs went from 6:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. and Central went for 12:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. This meant that those sports team members and their coaches from Central rarely if ever went to their 4th, 5th, or 6th hour classes because of practice to an event.

The total cost of construction of West, including architect’s fees, was $10, 576,338. This does not include furnishing and equipment costs, which were approximately $1,5000,00 additional. The actual total square footage is 349, 516, but it feels more like 100,000.

The building at Hazelwood West is best described as a closed campus design. The functions or subject areas are grouped into separate areas under one roof. The instructional materials center, administrative-guidance unit, cafeteria-commons and the physical education area serve as common use areas for the junior high and the senior high divisions. As an aside, the first year that the high school was here the social studies area had no walls. That meant that 11 rooms of students were in one big area, each trying to carry on a learning environment with 10 other classes. If one "class" was showing a movie all rooms heard and saw it. The faculty was not quite overjoyed with this. West finally got its "walls" after spring break in 1976. From the year 1976 till 2004 the social studies had thin layers of moveable "walls".

[edit] Activities

Students are involved in many activities, such as:

• Marching Band
• Football
• Baseball
• Basketball
• Track and Field
• Student Council
• Choir
• Theater
• Homecoming
• Swimming/Diving Team

[edit] Construction

During the summer of 2004, several changes took place at West. The Junior High became a Middle School and switched to block scheduling. A new wing at the left end of the building added several middle school classrooms. The social studies hall was redone, separating each classroom with permanent walls. The most prominent edition was a large band room added next to the theatre on the front patio.

[edit] The Future of West

The 2007-2008 school year will be the first year that Hazelwood West will strictly be a High School, as the middle school will be moving to a new facility.

[edit] External links

• Hazelwood School District Homepage
• Hazelwood West Homepage