History
West University Place Pershing Junior High School, which was named after John J. Pershing, was established in 1928. Pershing originally was connected to West University Elementary School (which was located in the city of West University Place after the city incorporated in 1938); the school moved to its own campus at 7000 Braes Boulevard in Houston in 1949. The campus was worth $2 million. This relieved West University Elementary. An arson incident occurred in August 1958.
In September 1991 Pershing was one of 32 HISD schools that had capped enrollments; in other words the school was filled to capacity and excess students had to attend other schools.
Originally, Houston ISD planned to remodel Pershing's 1949 campus. When HISD found that building a new campus from scratch would be more cost-effective, HISD decided to pursue that goal. Construction started on Pershing's brand new two-story 216,000-square-foot (20,100 m2) campus at 3838 Bluebonnet (on the same site as the old campus) during the summer of 2005. Construction was expected to end in Summer 2007, and the new campus was originally expected to open in Fall 2007 . The lead architect for the campus was PGAL, with Gilbane as the lead project manager. The original budget was $16,900,000 United States dollars. The construction costs totaled $24.4 million, and the final costs, including books, computers, and architect engineers, totaled $31 million.
The new building opened on Thursday, January 18, 2007; originally the building was slated to open the previous day, but weather conditions lead to the temporary closing of all HISD schools for January 17.
Portions of the former Pershing building remain because many chimney swift birds appeared in the chimney. The Migratory Bird Act makes the act of tearing down the Pershing chimney illegal.
Read more about this topic: Pershing Middle School (Houston)
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