General William J. Palmer High School

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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

Seal of Palmer High School<--need actual seal-->

Name

General William J. Palmer High School

Address

301 North Nevada Avenue

Town

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Established

1874

Community

Urban

Type

Public Secondary

Religion

Secular

Students

Coeducational

Grades

9 to 12

Accreditation

Western Association of Schools and Colleges

District

Colorado State Department of Education

Subdistrict

Colorado Springs School District 11

Nickname

Terrors

Mascot

Eagle

Colors

Brown and White

Motto

"A Tradition of Excellence"

Military

(no JROTC)

Newspaper

The Lever

Yearbook

Retrospect

Distinctions

National Register of Historic Places

Website

Link

Email

Link

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.

1 History
2 Notable alumni
3 See also
4 External links and references

[edit] 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.

Eaglebeak

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. 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.