Paul Laurence Dunbar High School (Lexington, Kentucky)
| Paul Laurence Dunbar High School | |
|---|---|
| Address | |
|
1600 Man o' War Boulevard Lexington, Kentucky 40513 |
|
| Information | |
| School type | Public |
| Founded | 1990 |
| Principal | Betsy Rains |
| Grades | 9-12 |
| Enrollment | 2,142 (2008–09) |
| Language | English |
| Area | Suburban |
| Color(s) | Red █ and Black █ |
| Mascot | Bulldog |
| Website | www |
Paul Laurence Dunbar High School (PLD) is a secondary school located at 1600 Man o' War Boulevard on the southwest side of Lexington, Kentucky, USA. The school is one of five high schools in the Fayette County Public Schools district.
Paul Laurence Dunbar High School is named after the 19th century African-American poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose parents were from Kentucky. Opened in 1990, the school is the newest high school in the Fayette County Public Schools system. With an enrollment of over 2100, it is one of the largest public high schools in Kentucky, and was the largest during the 2005–06, 2006–07, and 2007–08 academic years. It also houses the Math, Science, and Technology Center. The PLD student body, unlike that of most of the other schools named after Dunbar, has a substantial white majority, although African Americans and Hispanics make up roughly one sixth of the students.
Dunbar's band and cheerleading programs have won national acclaim, while PLD has earned a local reputation as an outstanding school, excelling in academics, athletics, and fine arts.
The school name was part of a political deal made in 1965 with the city's African-American community. In the era of segregated schools, Dunbar High School, also named after the poet, was the city's lone surviving black high school (grades 10-12 of Douglass School had been shut down in 1963) and one of the main cornerstones of Lexington's black community. When Fayette County's schools integrated in 1967, Dunbar High was closed, with its students being bused to four previously white schools. Eventually, the county school board agreed that the next high school to open in Lexington would bear Dunbar's name, principally at the urging of the Rev. William Augustus Jones, Sr., senior minister of Lexington's oldest and largest black church and a civil rights leader whose five oldest children had graduated from Dunbar and embarked on careers of distinction. To the board's credit, it kept its word, even though a full generation had passed since the original agreement. To keep the schools differentiated, the new school was given the poet's full name, rather than just the last name as with the old school. As an additional tribute to the old Dunbar High School, the gymnasium was named the "S.T. Roach Sports Center" for basketball coach Sanford T Roach, who led the school to a 512-142 record from 1942 to 1965, and is a member of the National High School Sports Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. The new PLD adopted the original school colors of the old Dunbar High (which were red and black, but changed to green and white during the 1940s). The new high school did not, however, retain the former school's "Bearcats" mascot. A vote of the school's future students shortly before the school's opening favored "Bulldogs" and selected "The Victors", by Louis Elbel, as the basis of the fight song.
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