History
Van Nuys High School opened in 1915, four years after Van Nuys was established. For years, the only high schools in the Valley were Van Nuys, Owensmouth (now Canoga Park), San Fernando, and North Hollywood. The main buildings and auditorium date from the 1930s. The football and track stadium, originally built at the same time as the current high school, is named for Bob Waterfield, and the baseball field for Don Drysdale, the two most famous athletes to have played for VNHS.
The Los Angeles Unified School District ordered Van Nuys High School to convert to year-round scheduling in 2001 due to reasons such as overcrowding. Even though it relieved the overcrowding of Van Nuys High School, the Magnet Programs separated tracks, along with the residential students. The Performing Arts Magnet and the Medical Magnet were only available on the A-Track Schedule, while the Math and Science Magnet was only available on the C-Track Schedule. B-Trackers could not take the same classes as C-Trackers, while C-Trackers could only take certain A-Track classes. Teachers that had both A-Track and C-Track students were frustrated because the curriculum had to be synchronized with both tracks.
Van Nuys High School returned to the Traditional School Calendar in 2005. The switch was caused by a decline in the school population and by a new district policy to eliminate year-round schools whenever possible.
The opening of Panorama High School in October 2006, relieved overcrowding at Van Nuys High School.
Van Nuys High School has the highest AP passing rate in LAUSD for two consecutive years.
Read more about this topic: Van Nuys High School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)