Westside High School is a secondary school in Houston, Texas, United States. It serves grades 9 through 12 and is part of the Houston Independent School District.
The school is located at 14201 Briar Forest in Houston, Texas, in the 77077 zip code. Westside High School is outside of Beltway 8, east of State Highway 6, inside State Highway 99 (Grand Parkway), and south of Interstate 10 (Katy Freeway) in the Briar Forest area.
Westside is HISD's Magnet School for Integrated Technology. The program allows students to look at technology from one of five aspects: Fine Arts, Business, Media Relations, Applied Science/Health Science, and Computing Sciences. During the first year, all Magnet students take a technology survey course, a modular course that introduces them to the five strands of the program. The second year, students are asked to choose one of the five strands on which to focus their elective courses.
The school's academic programs, ranked #463, #196, #230, #245, and #1,958th in Newsweek magazine's 2005, 2006 2007, 2008, and 2013 lists, respectively, of the top 2,000 high schools in the United States.
, many students in other parts of Houston ISD transferred to Westside to escape home schools that do not have a good academic performance, causing the attendance figures of those schools to suffer.
Westside athletics compete as the Westside Wolves, and the school's mascot is Wesley the Wolf.
History
Westside opened in 2000 as a brand-new fifty-million-dollar building, taking about 1,000 students from Lee High School (now Margaret Long Wisdom High School), which was experiencing overcrowding. Westside planned to compete with Bellaire and Lamar high schools in Houston ISD for "premier" status. It initially had a reputation as a school that could attract private school students to a public school. When Westside opened, residents of the Lee attendance boundary were given the option to attend Westside instead of Lee, with no free transportation provided. The school at first had 1,772 students, including 340 students who, in the previous school year, were not enrolled in HISD. Westside is so-named because it is located in western Houston.
Scott Van Beck was the first principal of Westside. In 2005 he was promoted to being the West District head. Later in that year, Paul Castro became Westside principal; he was 29 at the time he had his first school principal job. That year about 300 students from New Orleans, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, enrolled at Westside, causing overcrowding and making the overall student population over 3,000. According to the October 2006 HISD "For Your Information" newsletter, Westside was one of four high schools that took the most refugees from Hurricane Katrina.
By March 2006, Westside had posted slightly lower SAT and graduation rates than Lamar and Bellaire. In a March 2006 Houston Press article, Dr. Robert Sanborn, the president and CEO of the organization Children at Risk, said that Westside's "slow progress", as paraphrased by the article's author Todd Spivak, was more disappointing than Lamar and Bellaire's dropout rates.
In fall of the 2008–2009 school year, a petroleum academy by the name of Westside Engineering and Geosciences Academy was opened at Westside High School.
In 2007, 6% of high school-aged children zoned to Westside chose to attend alternative Houston ISD schools.
In 2010, Richard Connelly of the Houston Press said that Westside became "something of a success story for HISD."
In 2010, Castro was transferred to become the new principal of Lee High School (now Margaret Long Wisdom High School).
Recognitions
The Westside dance troupe Inertia Dance Co. has been featured in People magazine and on Good Morning America. At one point, a reality show was planned for the troupe.
Westside won the Division II State Lacrosse title in 2004. Westside High School's rugby team incorporated with a public high school in the Houston Independent School District. The Westside Wrestling program has won Districts for the past 10 years and has had four individual state champions.
Westside High School won its first SECME State Competition in 2008.
Campus
Westside is on a campus, located along Briar Forest Road, near Texas State Highway 6. Several gated communities are in proximity to the school.
The school was built for $50 million. The school has one auditorium, two theaters, four athletic fields, 11 music practice rooms, an orchestra hall, a band hall, a broadcast studio, a ceramics studio, and computer labs. Melissa Hung of the Houston Press wrote in 2000 that "The eating area resembles a college food court more than a high school cafeteria."