Spotswood High School (Virginia)
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Spotswood High School is a high school in Penn Laird, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As of 2005, it competes in the AA division of the Virginia High School League. Its current rivalries include feuds with nearby Turner Ashby and Harrisonburg High Schools.
Spotswood High School was established in 1980 as Spotswood Senior High School, serving grades 10-12. James Upperman was the first principal. The school was named in honor of Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Spotswood. The school colors, blue and gray, were selected from the colors of the two high schools it consolidated in the 1980s: Elkton High School (blue and gold) and Montevideo (maroon and gray). In the fall of 1984, Spotswood became a 9-12 school and changed to its present name, Spotswood High School.
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[edit] Controversy
Spotswood made headlines briefly in 2000, when teacher Jeff Newton, with the backing of freedom of speech advocacy organizations including the ACLU and American Library Association, went to court over an incident covering several weeks in September 1999, when then principal C. James Slye ordered Newton to remove anticensorship pamphlets from his classroom's door that had been posted in observance of Banned Books Week. The pamphlet in question was a list of books that had been challenged or banned in schools, libraries and bookstores around the country during the late 1990s; these books include several revered and widely read American works, such as Huckleberry Finn, The Color Purple, Of Mice and Men and Death of a Salesman, but also include highly sexualized or "vulgar" books that the US Supreme Court found legal to exclude from public schools in the 1982 case of Board of Education v. Pico. [1] The ACLU charged that Spotswood was effectively censoring the anticensorship message of the pamphlet outside of his constitutional rights and blatantly failed to follow the Rockingham County School Board Policy for mediating issues related to controversial and sensitive materials. The suit was dismissed before the case could be heard, when Newton resigned from the district.
[edit] Student body
The enrollment of Spotswood is approaching the 1500 mark. The students come from several small towns in the area. In 2005, the girls basketball team won the Group AA State Championship. Spotswood also has a very reputable competition cheerleading squad, claiming five straight district titles, a Region II Championship and runner-up, and two Group AA State Championship Runners-up. Not only are their girls sports competitive, but their boys cross country team, the boys indoor track team, and the boys swimming teams give area schools some class a compitition.
[edit] Current administration
- Principal- Tim Woodward
- Asst. Principals- R. Dansey, Alicia Corral-Clark, Joe Taylor
[edit] External links
- Spotswood High School website
- History of Spotswood High School
- ACLU letter to Spotswood High School: December 1st, 1999 letter to Spotswood High School regarding the school-instituted ban of the American Library Association banned books pamphlets.
