Gardena High School


Gardena High School is a public high school in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States, adjacent to the City of Gardena. It serves grades 9 through 12 and is a part of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
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Small learning communities

Gardena High School has two magnets and two academies on campus: the Global Business Magnet, the Law and Public Service Magnet, the Creative Arts Academy and the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics Academy.

History

The Los Angeles Unified School District stated that Gardena High School opened in 1907. The original iteration of the school began in 1904. It changed buildings in 1905, and at that time became known as Jewell Union High School. A $20,000 bond for a replacement building was issued in 1906, and the school became known as Gardena High School and joined the Los Angeles City High School District the following year. Beginning in 1908 the school was known as Gardena Agricultural High School, but John Whitely, who took the position as principal in 1918, reverted the name.
Whitely in 1919, started a tradition of the 12th grade class, at the end of the year, buying a painting to bring to the school to add to the school's art collection. Gardena High was one of several schools that had painting collections. In 1999, Irvine Museum executive director Jean Stern stated that, in the words of Jean Merz of the Los Angeles Times, "the Gardena High collection is unique in its size and quality." In April 1932 Arthur Millier, writing for the Los Angeles Times, stated that ""
In 1956, the junior high school classes stayed at the old Gardena High School while the high school classes moved into a new building designed by architects Henry L. Gogerty and D. Stewart Kerr. Up until the opening of the new Gardena High School, high school students held morning shifts, while junior high school students held afternoon shifts. The junior high is now known as Peary Middle School. The painting collection tradition ended with the move, and the paintings numbered 90. The majority were placed in a basement.
The official opening of the new high school was September 17, 1956. There were to be 67 teachers and 1,600 students in grades 10-12 upon opening. The price tag was about $5,000,000. Upon opening the curriculum and attendance boundary were largely to stay the same. The two non-English languages as a second language classes available were French and Spanish. The school opened with a working farm.
In 1961 the Los Angeles city high school district merged into the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Two additional classroom buildings were scheduled to begin construction in 1964.
In the 1990s California State University Dominguez Hills president Robert C. Detweiler and art director Kathy Zimmerer facilitated a planned restoration of the paintings and received a grant to establish an exhibition of about half of the paintings. Several of the paintings had received damage. Two had been destroyed by the conditions in the period 1955-circa 1995.
In 2015 the Autry Museum exhibited some of the works of art that had been displayed at Gardena High.

Attendance boundary

The school serves the City of Gardena, portions of Carson, and portions of Los Angeles.

Features

The northern end of the campus has Los Angeles Unified School District staff housing, Sage Park Apartments. It takes up of land. It opened in 2015. Its buildings have three and four stories each, and 90 units total are present.

Demographics

As of the school year 2008–09, there were a total of 3,186 students attending the high school.

Notable alumni