General William J. Palmer High School

General William J. Palmer High School
A Tradition of Excellence
Location
301 North Nevada Avenue Colorado Springs, Colorado
Coordinates	38°50′20″N 104°49′12″W / 38.839°N 104.820°W / 38.839; -104.820Coordinates: 38°50′20″N 104°49′12″W / 38.839°N 104.820°W / 38.839; -104.820
Information
Type	Public Secondary
Established	1875
School district	Colorado Springs School District 11
Grades	9 to 12
Enrollment	2013 students
Color(s)	Brown and white
Mascot	Eagle
Affiliation	Western Association of Schools and Colleges
Information	http://www.d11.org/palmer/ask_palmer.htm
Nickname	Terrors
Newspaper	The Lever
Yearbook	Terror Trail
TV	Terror TV
Website	http://www.d11.org/palmer/

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 is a secondary school located in downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado. The school has a student population of approximately 2,000 students, 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.

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 renamed 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.

In 1945, a Native American student, Don Willis, designed Eaglebeak, a caricature of a fictitious Indian chieftain, and the school's teams became the Terrors. In 1985 a local political hopeful criticized the mascot as racist, making Palmer one of the 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.