Balboa High School, colloquially known as Bal, is an American public high school located near the Excelsior District in the Mission Terrace neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Balboa serves grades nine through 12 as part of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).
Balboa is a comprehensive school located in an urban working class district. It educates a greater proportion of the city's disadvantaged and minority students relative to other city high schools. Mirroring conditions in the areas it serves, the school has a history marked by periods of violence, controversy, and low academic performance.
The school motto is "First on the Pacific". The campus is the only historic landmark school in the district and the only one operating in the city. Following the dismissal of the entire faculty in 1999, it became the first school in northern California to embrace and convert its curriculum to the concept of small learning communities. It was the first in California to start a school-based student health clinic. In response to the AIDS pandemic, it was the first school in California to distribute free condoms to students. In the last decade, Balboa has experienced a turnaround and has improved its reputation and academic performance. The school achieved placement on Newsweek "America's Top Public High Schools" list in 2007 and 2008.
History
Balboa High School is named for 16th-century Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Founded in 1928, campus construction was completed in 1931.
In the spring of 1952, students at Balboa invented a variation on a conga line dance which inspired bandleader and songwriter Ray Anthony to compose an accompanying hit song with the same name, "The Bunny Hop".
In 1986, Balboa converted its metal shop into the first school-based health clinic in California: the Balboa Teen Health Center. The clinic provides basic medical and mental health services. The clinic has improved access and the health habits of a disadvantaged student population that might otherwise have no professional health assistance.
In an effort to prevent the spread of AIDS, Balboa became the first school in California to distribute free condoms to students in May 1992. This program and the clinic's other family planning and sexually transmitted disease efforts have featured somewhat controversially in a number of research papers and debates.
Balboa became embroiled in controversy over a hazing incident on February 22, 1994, in which three Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) cadets were assaulted by other team members under orders from senior commanders and one cadet was rendered partially deaf from a punctured eardrum. The resulting litigation from this incident exposed a culture and history of JROTC hazing at Balboa and several other SFUSD schools extending back to the 1980s. This controversy has been cited by JROTC opponents in efforts to eliminate the program at all SFUSD schools, which lasted from 2007 to 2009.
On August 30, 2018, a firearm was discharged in the little theatre room where a student was playing with it in his backpack. Four students were arrested; two were able to return to school. The incident is included on the List of school shootings in the United States.
Academic resurgence
In 1996, frustrated by high turnover and low performance on the part of the educational staff, the SFUSD dismissed the entire faculty.
During the 1999–2000 academic year, Balboa shifted its academic program to the concept of Small Learning Communities (SLC). These communities would form a 'school within a school" in an effort to turn around past poor academic performance. To support the formation of SLCs, Balboa was the recipient of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2004 and 2005 through the Every Child Can Learn Foundation Secondary Redesign Initiative.