Westbury High School (Houston)

Westbury High School is a secondary school located in Brays Oaks, of Southwest Houston, Texas, near the Westbury neighborhood. It has grades 9 through 12, and is part of the Houston Independent School District. As of 2015 the principal is Susan Monaghan.

In addition to its academic programs it has automotive technology, health science, and business career programs.

Westbury High School opened its doors for the first time in the fall of 1961. The three-story building with its main entrance facing Gasmer Street housed the administrative offices, classrooms, a cafeteria, an auditorium, library and a gym. The grounds were bare; no trees or grass greeted the first classes on opening day. To the right of the building, at the corner of Chimney Rock and Gasmer Streets, stood "The Company Store", a hardware store.

Westbury's 1961 enrollment consisted of 813 students - seniors, juniors, sophomores coming from Bellaire, Lamar, and San Jacinto High Schools, and freshmen coming from Johnston Jr High School. After the first year, there would not be a freshman class until the late 1970s. Of that first year's class, 58 seniors received their diplomas in the Westbury High School auditorium.

Shading the school was the water tower that served the Westbury neighborhood. Mary Beth Kulp and Donna Harkness, the editors of the first yearbook, imagined the water tower as a silent citadel watching over the students, teachers, and administrators as they busied themselves with the task of transferring from one generation to the next the culture of the western world. They imagined the water tower thinking as it looked down on the school. "I, the majestic water tower beside it, hear its name and feel a part of it." The metaphor of the water tower as citadel became the title of Westbury's yearbook. The students became the "Westbury Rebels".

W. I. "Jim" Burns was Westbury's first principal. A lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Burns had taught chemistry at San Jacinto and Lamar High Schools and had opened Bellaire High School as assistant principal. The principal of Bellaire, Harland Andrews, complained that all of his good teachers wanted to transfer to Westbury so they could work under Burns. Many of the first staff members did, indeed, follow Burns from Bellaire High School. Among them were Westbury's first assistant principal, Kenneth Gupton, and the dean, Rivers Lodge. Lodge became assistant principal in 1970.

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