Palmer High School (Colorado)

This article is on the high school located in Colorado Springs. For the high school located in Monument, Colorado, please see Lewis-Palmer High School.

General William J. Palmer High School
File:Palmerhorse.jpg
Location
301 North Nevada Avenue Colorado Springs, Colorado
Information
Type	Public Secondary
Motto	A Tradition of Excellence
Established	1874
School district	Colorado Springs School District 11
Grades	9 to 12
Enrollment	2013 students
Campus type	National Register of Historic Places
Color(s)	brown and white
Mascot	eagle
Affiliation	Western Association of Schools and Colleges
Information	http://www.d11.org/palmer/ask_palmer.htm
Nickname	Terrors
Newspaper	The Lever
Yearbook	Retrospect
TV	Terror TV
Website	http://www.d11.org/palmer/

General William J. Palmer High School is a secondary school located in downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado. The school has a student population of approximately 1800, and attracts enrollment from all over the city. The flagship high school of School District 11, Palmer has the oldest International Baccalaureate (IB) program in the area, founded in 1991.

History

Palmer High School is located at 301 North Nevada Avenue in Colorado Springs. The present building was built by the Works Progress Administration under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. Originally named Colorado Springs High School, Palmer High School was re-named in 1959 after the city's founder, General William Jackson Palmer. At that date, the city had expanded enough to warrant the building of a second high school, Roy J. Wasson High School.

The school traces its history back to the 1870s and still uses a "C" for varsity letters, which through 1986 was referred to as the Broken Circle Tribe. In 1894, the successful football team earned the nickname "holy terrors," and so the school adopted the nickname "Terrors." In 1923, the football team won the national championship, the same year that Fred Fink wrote the beloved "Terror Fight Song." Prior to 1945, the school's mascot was a pit bull.

File:Eaglebeak.jpg

Eaglebeak

In 1945, a Native American student, Don Willis, designed Eaglebeak, a caricature of a fictitious Indian chieftain, beloved and respected by students and faculty alike, and the teams became the Terrors. In 1985 a local political hopeful criticized the mascot as racist to further his election bid, making Palmer one of the very first cases of controversy over a Native American mascot in the United States. Despite the fact that the politician, having lost the election, later publicly apologized to the student body and retracted the charge of racism, the damage was done and Eaglebeak was not to return. In the following years, Palmer experimented with a variety of mascots, to include a two-month flirtation with the Tasmanian devil from Warner Brothers, which nearly led to a lawsuit.

In the early 1990s the high school chose an eagle as its mascot, naming it "Eaglebeak", but without the historical background of the original.

School activities and programs

The Lever is Palmer's student run newspaper. It is run by students with a teacher serving as an advisor. The newspaper is published nearly every school month, and is free to all students and staff members. Recently, the newspaper digitized its previous issues, and can now be accessed online.

Terror TV is a student television program, about five minutes long, featuring current students and teachers in skits, interviews, Palmer events and coverage.

Feeder patterns

Middle schools that feed into Palmer include

• Horace Mann Middle School
• North Middle School

Notable alumni

Notable alumni of Palmer High School include:

• Robert M. Isaac (1945, as Colorado Springs High School), mayor of Colorado Springs
• Cassandra Peterson (1969), who played Elvira, Mistress of the Dark
• Reginald McKnight (1974) novelist, short story writer, Hamilton Holmes Professor of English at the University of Georgia
• Chris Fowler (1981), host of ESPN College Gameday
• Lance Armstrong, seven-time consecutive Tour de France winner, founder of the philanthropic Lance Armstrong Foundation[1]
• Bryce Case (2000), rapper, former hacker, and internet entrepreneur

External links and references

• official Palmer High School website
• history
• CSHS/Palmer Alumni Association
• Student's art battle winds up unifying, Mark Arnest, The Gazette (May 20, 2005)
• Class dismissed: Planned Parenthood ejected from District 11 schools, deYoanna, Michael, The Independent (February 24, 2005)