Carnegie Vanguard High School

The HISD Vanguard program was designed to serve the needs of gifted and talented students. From fall 1977 to spring 2002, the HISD High School Vanguard Program was a separate program located at Jesse Jones High School.[6] It is one of the many Magnet schools in HISD designed to attract a diverse ethnicity of students by former HISD Superintendent Billy Regan.

The reinstatement of Lawrence Allen, the Jones HS principal, who was put in charge of the comprehensive program at Jones, prompted the HISD Vanguard program separation.[7]

Carnegie Vanguard High School opened in August 2002 in the former Carnegie Elementary School building on Scott Street and Airport Boulevard near the Sunnyside neighborhood.[8] Carnegie began its first year as a separate school (2002–2003) with 173 students.[9] The elementary school students who attended Carnegie Elementary were moved to Woodson Middle School, which became the Woodson K-8 School;[10] Woodson now has only elementary grades.[11]

In November 2008, HISD proposed to rebuild Carnegie and Worthing and have the two schools share the same cafeteria. Parents at Worthing accepted the proposal while parents at Carnegie asked for the proposal to be discontinued due to high violence levels at Worthing.[12][13][14] On December 4, 2008, Abelardo Saavedra, the HISD superintendent at the time, shelve plans of Carnegie and Worthing sharing cafeterias since the proposal had insufficient support from the board of trustees.[15]

Carnegie Vanguard High School old campus

In 2009, HISD administration proposed relocating Carnegie to the Fourth Ward. District administrators favored the move because students come from across the school district, and the central location would make transportation easier.[16] During that year the school board approved of the plan.[17] The former Sunnyside Campus has been used for military tactical training by multiple agencies, including the United States Army.[18]

Groundbreaking occurred in May 2011.[19] The current campus opened in August 2012.[20]

The current campus is located in the Fourth Ward, Houston.[21] It is in proximity to Downtown,[16] and to Midtown.[22] HISD provides school bus transportation to students who live more than two miles away from the school.[23] The new campus is located on a 6-acre (2.4 ha) plot at the northeast corner of West Gray Street and Taft Street. The new building can house up to 750 students. Parents, staff members, and students provided input for the design of the new CVHS campus. The building committee lobbied for a central courtyard, which is a part of the school's culture.[24] The new building shares its site with the Gregory Lincoln Education Center.[25] The district had initially intended for a new campus of the High School for Performing and Visual Arts to be built at the site that is occupied by the new Carnegie.[26] Rey de la Reza Architects, Inc. developed the current Carnegie campus. The theater building is a former Orange Crush bottling plant and is one of the few remaining Art Deco buildings in Houston. The HISD bond did not cover the Orange Crush renovation.[22]

The previous Carnegie campus was located in the former Carnegie Elementary School building off of Scott Street and Airport Boulevard near the Sunnyside neighborhood.[8] The former Carnegie Elementary building had about 42,500 square feet (3,950 m²) of space, including the exterior corridors.[27] The old campus was located adjacent to a horse pasture. Lisa Gray of the Houston Chronicle said that the "shabby" campus was "far not only from most of its students' homes, but also from most Houstonians' consciousness."[22] Gray also said that "By accident, the old elementary school's layout promoted the kind of effortless mixing that the latest designs for offices and research facilities strive to encourage."[22]

Carnegie Vanguard offers only Pre-Advanced Placement (Pre-AP) and Advanced Placement (AP) courses in English, Math, Science, and Social Studies as well as Honors elective courses in core subject areas. The curriculum for every course is written to go above and beyond state and district standards. Carnegie Vanguard courses move at a quicker pace, cover more material, and are project based. They rely heavily on discussion and seminar style delivery of course information and the use, interpretation, and delivery of research.

Each Carnegie Vanguard student is required to take at least 10 AP courses before graduation: AP English Language and Composition, AP English Literature, AP Capstone {Seminar and Research}, AP Physics 1, AP Human Geography, AP World History, AP US History, AP Economics, and AP US Government and Politics. Students can potentially take up to 18 Advanced Placement classes if desired.

For the past several years, Carnegie Vanguard has been consistently ranked as a top 30 public high school in the country by several major magazines and journals including Newsweek, Washington Post, and the US News and World Report.

Carnegie scores the highest scores on the SAT and PSAT on the Critical Reading Section and Mathematics Section in HISD, just beating Debakey High School.

The school capacity is 826 students.

2019-2020 Ethnic Demographics:[30]

33% Hispanic

30% Asian

22% White

10% Black

4% Other

100% of students that graduate from Carnegie attend a 2 or 4 year college or university. Usually most graduates chose to matriculate at the University of Houston or the University of Texas at Austin.[31] Carnegie students have also been accepted to many prestigious and highly selective colleges including Rice University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, Wellesley College, Duke University, University of California - Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Spelman College, Howard University, University of California - Los Angeles, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Brown University, Columbia University, Tulane University, University of Virginia, University of Michigan, New York University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Chicago.

Carnegie competes in UIL Region 3, District 18, Conference 6A with schools twice to five times larger.[32][33] This conference includes Bellaire HS, Chavez HS, Lamar HS, Heights HS (formerly named Reagan HS), Westside HS, and Westbury HS which have students populations of 2000 students or more. Carnegie, which has a student population of less than 800 students, is included in this conference because of its special school status. Because it is a magnet school, Carnegie Vanguard is able to admit students from all over the HISD giving them an unfair advantage, according to UIL, so they are put in the same conference as large schools. But, Carnegie Vanguard makes the argument that no one would go to Carnegie for sports due to the overwhelming work load compared to other schools.

In 2015, Carnegie Vanguard was the only magnet-only school to have UIL Sports. When other magnet-only schools complained that they were not accepted by HISD UIL Department for UIL sports, the school board took action. The HISD School Board originally thought it was fair take away Carnegie UIL Sports and take away the ability for other magnet-only to get UIL Sports to be consistent and because they falsely thought Title IV was not met at Carnegie Vanguard. But, in November 2015, over 1000 individuals signed an online petition asking the HISD athletics director, Marmion Dambrino, to have Carnegie remain in UIL. The HISD School Board voted that Carnegie will continue to participate in the UIL as well as letting other special school status schools get UIL sports.