History
Spring Woods High School opened in 1964 during the population boom in the western suburbs of Houston on the former grounds of the Spring Branch Country Club. It opened within a year of the openings of Spring Oaks Junior High (now Spring Oaks Middle School) and Westwood Elementary School, all immediately adjacent on the same former golf course. Currently the second-oldest functioning high school in the Spring Branch ISD, Spring Woods serves the northwest part of the district, roughly an area north of Interstate 10 and west of Gessner Road. Expanded and renovated several times, the Spring Woods campus has wide courtyards in which classrooms face inwards, yet with passages that are open to the outside air, a different approach than Northbrook High School and Stratford High School, the two newer schools in the district, which are mostly enclosed but are still kept dry and warm when weather becomes an issue. Spring Woods opened about the same time and with a similar design as Westchester High School, which closed in the 1980s and is currently home to a district-run charter school called Westchester Academy for International Studies.
It is generally believed that the choice of the Navy Hymn as the tune of the school song is in tribute to World War II Navy hero and President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated the year before Spring Woods opened. The song was played at his funeral.
In 1992 the school's student body was 25% Hispanic, 13% Black, and 13% Asian. In May 1992 25 12th grade students vandalized the school by spray painting racial slurs, placing the Confederate flag on the flagpole, placing a dead raccoon and a dead opossum in two empty lockers, and drew an image of a black person being impaled on a cross. The principal of Spring Woods, Perry Pope, said that the students took their prank "too far."
Spring Woods was named a 1997-98 National Blue Ribbon School.
Read more about this topic: Spring Woods High School
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