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 Frederick Douglass plaque at Douglass Elementary School
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In addition to other landmarks, the public schools of the San Antonio Independent School District have contributed to the city's literary traditions. Several of them, for example, are named after classic American authors. These include Franklin, Wheatley, Irving, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Douglass, and Twain. Sadly, Poe–Middle School, that is–reached an unacceptable state of dilapidation and was recently demolished, perhaps reflecting its namesake, even though the school has been rebuilt on the same site with the same famous name. On a happier note, it seems appropriate that one of the District's high schools was named after Sydney Lanier, in recognition of the contribution that the Georgia poet made as a literary visitor to San Antonio in 1872-1873. Jefferson High School can also be included here; after all, Thomas Jefferson's writings, like those of Franklin and Douglass(also listed above), are frequently studied in high school and college literary courses as literary documents. |
 Old Main Avenue High School (DRT Library)
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Another high school that has literary connections–at least indirect ones–is Fox Tech High School. It is located on Main Avenue just north of downtown in the vicinity of the new public library and the Southwest School of Art and Craft (the old Ursuline Academy), which Sydney Lanier visited and described. However, the literary connection with Fox Tech concerns William Butler Yeats, the celebrated Irish poet, who visited San Antonio on a lecture tour in 1920 and spoke at the Main Avenue High School on Wednesday, April 14, according to that day's edition of the San Antonio Express. The headline read, "THEATRE OF THE PEOPLE THEME OF YEATS' LECTURE/ FAMED IRISH POET AT THE MAIN AVENUE HIGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM TONIGHT." In subsequent years Main Avenue High School was enlarged and eventually replaced by the present high school, Fox Tech, but the latter structure boasts a plaque near the main entrance which attests to the site's historical significance. |
 Frontal view of Brackenridge High School |
A more amusing anecdote concerns another San Antonio public high school and–surprisingly– the eighteenth century African-American poetess, Phillis Wheatley. Even though she entered childhood as a slave to a New England merchant family, from whom she took her surname, Wheatley is generally considered one of the most important American poets of the eighteenth century. Her collection of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), was probably the first book by an African-American to be published. As a result of her accomplishment, when the original Brackenridge High School on the city's south side, which had been built in 1919, was replaced with a new structure during the 1970's, the District decided to rename it Phillis Wheatley High School, in honor of the first African-American author. Unfortunately, the name change did not please the close-knit alumni of the original Brackenridge campus, many of whom had attended the old school decades earlier, when that area of town was a prominent middle-class neighborhood. In all fairness, the motivation of the alumni was not racial–and certainly not racist. They simply wanted to hold on to the prominent local name with which they identified their high school traditions of years past. Their influence was strong enough that the San Antonio Independent School District changed the name of the new facility, located a few blocks east of the King William Historic District, back to Brackenridge High School, and the black poetess' name was "demoted" to an institution called Phillis Wheatley Middle School(which had formerly been an all-black high school). |
 View of Woodlawn Lake
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In addition to San Antonio's public schools, private schools have occasionally influenced the local literary scene. As early as 1903, for instance, Katherine Anne Porter's family moved from Kyle, Texas, to San Antonio, where Porter attended a now defunct private institution, located in the vicinity of Woodlawn Lake, called the Thomas School. It was named after the man who operated it, Asa Thomas, who had earned an excellent reputation as a teacher and administrator. According to Porter's biographer, Joan Givner, young Katherine Anne disliked the expensive ($35) uniforms the girls were required to wear, which consisted of navy blue pleated skirts, white blouses with sailor collars, and mortar-board hats, which Porter thought made them look like little scholars (80). When a teacher explained to Porter that the uniforms were designed to prevent some girls from dressing better than other girls, it simply reinforced Katherine Anne's sense of poverty and inferiority, which may partly explain why she performed poorly in her studies, making D's in every course but English (Givner 80). Nevertheless, according to Givner, "in spite of distractions, disturbances, and miseries, Porter learned a great deal at Professor Thomas' school" (83), which would serve her well in later years. |
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More recently, Sandra Cisneros has given some literary attention to one of San Antonio's many Catholic schools. The example appears in "My Tocaya, [Namesake]" from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Here, the narrator is a fourteen-year-old student at the fictitious Our Lady of Sorrows High School, but the boy with whom she has become infatuated, Max Lucas Luna Luna, attends an existing parochial institution, Holy Cross High School. As Patricia Chávez tells the morbid story of her namesake's mysterious disappearance and eventual murder, she also reveals her dissatisfaction with the separation of the male and female students into separate institutions when she irreverently reflects, "Catholic school was afraid of putting us together too much, on account of hormones. That's what Sister Virginella said. If you can't conduct yourself like proper young ladies when our guests arrive, we'll have to suspend our Youth Exchanges indefinitely" (38). The narrator's dissatisfaction with the gender specific nature of these two schools--one actual and one fictitious--gives Cisneros the opportunity to approach the subject of Catholic secondary education critically against a background of violence seen through the eyes of a young adolescent. |
