West Anchorage High School
| West High School | |
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| Address | |
 West High School
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1700 Hillcrest Drive Anchorage, Alaska 99517 United States |
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| Coordinates | 61°12′02″N 149°54′59″W / 61.20056°N 149.91639°WCoordinates: 61°12′02″N 149°54′59″W / 61.20056°N 149.91639°W |
| Information | |
| Type | Public high school |
| Established | 1953 |
| School district | Anchorage School District |
| Principal | Rick Stone |
| Teaching staff | 105 |
| Grades | 9–12 |
| Enrollment | 1,842 (2016) |
| Color(s) | Orange and black |
| Athletics | Ranked 4A (large school) by the Alaska School Activities Association |
| Mascot | Eagles |
| Newspaper | Eagle's Cry Eagle's Quill |
| Yearbook | The Anchor |
| Website | west |
 West Anchorage High School in May 1997, showing its auditorium. View looking southerly from the Westchester Lagoon overlook at Margaret Eagan Sullivan Park. |
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West Anchorage High School (formerly Anchorage High School) is a public high school in Anchorage, Alaska. The school is part of the Anchorage School District (ASD). Opened in 1953, West is the oldest of ASD's eight major high schools. Serving the western parts of downtown and midtown Anchorage, it had an enrollment of 1,842 as of November 25, 2016, making it the second-largest school in Alaska after East Anchorage High School.
The school was established as Anchorage High School in 1953, during a boom period in Anchorage. Anchorage had gone from having one school, to having to hold classes in World War II-surplus Quonset huts, in less than a decade due to the rapid population influx to Anchorage, which was centered upon WWII, the Cold War and related construction activity at Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson. The Anchorage Independent School District (AISD), which consolidated the incorporated area of Anchorage with adjacent outlying areas for the purpose of providing education services, was formed in 1947 in response to this boom and the strain it placed upon public services, particularly education. A period of heightened school construction in the Anchorage area would follow throughout the 1950s.
The school was built in a part of Anchorage known as Romig Hill, in the northwest corner of what became Spenard. Just five years before the school's construction, this area was largely rural, populated by cabins and farms. The nearby KENI Radio Building constructed by Austin E. Lathrop was the only substantial construction in the area until the Spenard Public Utility District (PUD) was formed. Public utility districts, like independent school districts, were devised by the territorial legislature to address systemic problems inherent in municipal government at the time, which hampered providing services to growing communities. The school itself was not within the corporate limits of Anchorage at the time of its construction (those limits ended at 16th Avenue, the southern limit of the original townsite reserve), but would later be annexed by Anchorage. Following the Spenard PUD's formation, the area immediately surrounding the school saw a building boom, largely due to the efforts of real estate developers such as Earl and Wally Hickel.
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