History
East Side Union High School District trustees selected Evergreen Valley as the name of the proposed school on October 12, 2000, among other finalist considerations such as Ronald Reagan High School or Cesar Chávez High School. Evergreen Valley High School opened in 2002 on the "Small School" concept, with an emphasis on technology and the idea that every student would have a laptop to take home for doing homework. The school opened initially with only two grade levels: freshmen and sophomores. It existed as a single high school, with four mostly independent schools within it: Science & Technology, Global Economy, Human Performance, and Humanities. The first year EVHS was open, Science & Technology and Human Performance students received IBM Notebooks, while Global Economy and Humanities Students received Apple iBooks. In Fall 2002, the campus was still unfinished, so classes took place in portables on two nearby campuses: Silver Creek High School and Mount Pleasant High School. S&T and HU were situated at Silver Creek, while HP and GE were situated in Mt. Pleasant. The EVHS campus officially was open for attendance in January 2003. Administration tended to be unhelpful in teachers' and students' requests for aid, although they themselves were also swamped with the task of managing a brand new school.
In January 2004, petitions circulated after enrollment at Evergreen Valley quickly approached its limit of 1,800: one calling for shrunken boundaries and another for expansion. On March 11, 2004, district trustees voted to construct a new building on campus to ease overcrowding. In 2006, construction began for the building.
In July 2004, the San Jose Mercury News profiled the use of the Xanga blog site by EVHS students.
Principals existed for all of the schools, and were supervised by a primary principal. However, due to change in district leadership and issues with funding and philosophy, in February 2004, the small school system was done away with, and the high school adopted a traditional format, which it has kept until the present.
Several troubling instances occurred on one week in March 2009; overnight between March 14 and 15, a 20-foot swastika was etched on a lawn that had also been salted earlier, and several trees were cut down. Then on March 17, an envelope was mailed to school containing a suspicious white powder and a letter expressing dissatisfaction over the school's dress code policy regarding hats. This led to the administrative building being evacuated, but an investigation revealed that the substance was merely baby powder. Following rumors spread over the Internet that a shooting would occur that day, a majority of the student body did not show up to class on March 20. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and San Jose Police Department began a probe into these incidents immediately.
Another instance occurred on January 27, 2012, when a student was detained that Friday morning by the San Jose police after threatening to "shoot up" Evergreen Valley High School on a social networking site. Rumors of a shooting had already been circulating around the school since Wednesday of that week, prompting the police to search the boy's home and later on Friday, an intensive search for the boy. Lockdown of the school lasted for around one hour and was lifted around 10:30 AM. None of the student body or the staff were injured.
Read more about this topic: Evergreen Valley High School
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