Shawnee Mission School District - Shawnee Mission West High School

Shawnee Mission West High School

Shawnee Mission West's mascot is the Viking and the official school colors are black and gold. West opened its doors in 1962; since then, it has been remodeled several times. Additions have also been made to the school, the most famous of which is "the bridge," an actual bridge between halves of the school that later had classrooms added beneath it. The current principal of Shawnee Mission West is Dr. Charles McLean. As of 2006, its population is 2,042.It's located in Overland Park at 85th Street and Antioch Road. The former principal, Dr. Karl Krawitz was the NEA III District Educator of the Year for 2004-2005. SM West is home to both an award-winning school newspaper, the EPIC, and yearbook, SAGA. The Epic was ranked the 5th best Newsmagazine in the country by the Scholastic Press Association in 2010. SM West has twice (1986 and 2007) placed second at the National Forensic League tournament for policy debate. SM West has a student body population that is 10% African American, which is the highest African American population of any Shawnee Mission high school. Statistically, SM West is the most ethnically diverse high school in the district. SM West draws its student population from both Overland Park, Lenexa, and from small parts of Shawnee.

Read more about this topic:  Shawnee Mission School District

Famous quotes containing the words mission, west, high and/or school:

    ... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry].” He said he didn’t know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate’s coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.
    Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)

    Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day’s tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?
    —Jessamyn West (1902–1984)

    I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
    And not in paths of high morality,
    And not among the half-distinguished faces,
    The clouded forms of long-past history.
    Emily Brontë (1818–1848)

    I go to school to youth to learn the future.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)