Wheatley High School (Houston)

Phillis Wheatley High School is a secondary school located at 4801 Providence Street in Houston, Texas, United States with a ZIP code of 77020.

Wheatley, which serves 6 years, is a part of the Houston Independent School District. Wheatley, named after Phillis Wheatley, is located inside the 610 Loop in the Fifth Ward.

Wheatley has a technology magnet program inherited from the closure of Middle College for Technology Careers in spring 2006; Wheatley's program began in fall 2006.

In 1979 Wheatley principal Charles Herbert said that "For many, Fifth Ward is Wheatley High School" and that African-Americans who grew up in the Fifth Ward "still cling closely to Wheatley" even after they had moved to other parts of the United States.

Wheatley first opened at 3415 Lyons Avenue in the former McGowan Elementary School building on January 31, 1927.

In 1927 Wheatley High School was one of the largest Black high schools in the United States with 2,600 students and 60 teachers, and it was such throughout the segregation era. By 1949 Wheatley's first facility on Lyons Avenue became so overcrowded that students attended in shifts. During that year the 14-acre (57,000 m²), $2.5 million 4900 Market Street campus opened. The most expensive high school built in Houston at the time, the campus was designed by the firm MacKie & Kamrath in a Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced modernist style. The campus, described by the Houston Chronicle as "the finest Negro high school in the South," had a 1,500-seat auditorium, a gymnasium, an industrial arts facility, and a swimming pool. The school district spent attention on Wheatley in order to promote the argument that segregated minority schools can be equal to segregated White schools. The former Wheatley campus became E.O. Smith Middle School, and later the Carter Career Center.

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