Southwestern High School (Michigan)

Southwestern High School
Address
6921 W. Fort Street Detroit, Michigan United States
Information
Type	Public secondary
Closed	2012
School district	Detroit Public Schools
Faculty	37
Grades	9-12
Number of students	580
Mascot	Prospectors
Website	detroitk12.org/schools/school/584/

Southwestern High School was a high school in Southwest Detroit, Michigan, USA. It is part of the Detroit Public Schools district. The school's area, Southwest Detroit, has the majority of Detroit's Latino population. The school was located in a three-story building. It closed in 2012.

The school served Boynton–Oakwood Heights, Delray, and Springwells Village from September 1916 until June 2012.

John A. Nordstrum High School was built in 1915 and began its first semester in September 1916, although the desks had yet to arrive. They were still within a railroad boxcar that had been lost within Detroit's vast railyards. But it was overcrowded within a few years so Southwestern High School was built beside it, with the recent high school to become an intermediate school.

Southwestern was designed with a gymnasium, swimming pool, extensive track and field space, and an auditorium. It was one of the first schools developed following Michigan's enactment of statutes requiring mandatory attendance at high school. The students of adjoining Nordstrum attended the dedication of Southwestern in April 1922, and began using the building immediately, although the first regular classes began in September 1922. The January 1923 yearbook was called the Sou'wester.

The growth in Detroit's student population was so rapid, Nordstrom simply became a wing of Southwestern used mainly by ninth and tenth grade students, with the most advanced classes held in the newer building.

In a period prior to 1955, Southwestern was one of the schools serving high school students from the Allen Park School District. That year, Allen Park High School in Allen Park opened.

In the 1980s Guam-born Manny Crisostomo, working for the Detroit Free Press, received permission from the DPS superintendent to photograph the inside of the school, including the students. He took photographs for 40 weeks, and based on these photographs he won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize Feature Photography Award.

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