History
The school was established as Anchorage High School in 1953, during a boom period in Anchorage. Anchorage had gone from having one school, to having to hold classes in World War II-surplus Quonset huts, in less than a decade due to the rapid population influx to Anchorage, which was centered upon WWII, the Cold War and related construction activity at Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson. The Anchorage Independent School District (AISD), which consolidated the incorporated area of Anchorage with adjacent outlying areas for the purpose of providing education services, was formed in 1947 in response to this boom and the strain it placed upon public services, particularly education. A period of heightened school construction in the Anchorage area would follow throughout the 1950s.
The school was built in a part of Anchorage known as Romig Hill, in the northwest corner of what became Spenard. Just five years before the school's construction, this area was largely rural, populated by cabins and farms. The nearby KENI Radio Building constructed by Austin E. Lathrop was the only substantial construction in the area until the Spenard Public Utility District (PUD) was formed. Public utility districts, like independent school districts, were devised by the territorial legislature to address systemic problems inherent in municipal government at the time, which hampered providing services to growing communities. The school itself was not within the corporate limits of Anchorage at the time of its construction (those limits ended at 16th Avenue, the southern limit of the original townsite reserve), but would later be annexed by Anchorage. Following the Spenard PUD's formation, the area immediately surrounding the school saw a building boom, largely due to the efforts of real estate developers such as Earl Hillstrand and Wally Hickel.
The year after the school opened, Anchorage Community College (ACC), the lineal predecessor of the University of Alaska Anchorage, began holding classes in the building as well. ACC continued to use the building until they moved to the campus built in the Goose Lake neighborhood (an area now known as the University-Medical District, or U-Med for short) in the early 1970s. The school's name would change from Anchorage High School to West Anchorage High School following the opening of East Anchorage High School in 1962. AISD headquarters were located adjacent to the school, at what was (at the time) the northern end of Minnesota Drive. This building is currently home to the data processing facility of ASD.
Read more about this topic: West Anchorage High School
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