Juan Navarro High School

Originally Named Sidney Lanier High School, Juan Navarro High School was established in 1961 as the sixth high school in the Austin Independent School District and was originally located in the building which is now Burnet Middle School. Lanier is named in honor of the famous southern poet Sidney Lanier. The Austin Independent School District Trustees voted on March 24, 2019, to rename the school Juan Navarro High School. Juan Navarro was a 2007 graduate who died in Afghanistan from an improvised explosive device IED in July 2012. The current campus, opened in 1966, is located on Payton Gin Road. In 1997, Lanier was nationally recognized as a Blue Ribbon School, the highest honor a school could receive at the time. When it first opened, Lanier had virtually an all Caucasian student base with a highly active FFA Chapter, but over the years it has become a primarily Mexican-American school with close to 85% of its students being Latino.