While the days of building new schools left and right to keep up with a booming population are mostly behind San Antonio’s school districts, the school-naming processes established in that era are not entirely obsolete.
San Antonio has more than 1,000 schools named after aspects of local and national history, honoring famous residents — and in some cases, they have been renamed following community pressure. From John Jay High School to Tradition Elementary, here’s a rundown of how some of the community’s schools got their names.
No school naming policy is the same throughout the city’s more than a dozen school districts, but they do follow similar patterns.
Usually, the bigger the school, the bigger and more well-known the name: when locals meet other locals, they usually ask each other were they went to high school, which tend to be the largest campuses locally based on area and enrollment.
Smaller schools, like elementary schools, tend to have more local ties, with names paying homage to a community figure or local hero.
At San Antonio Independent School District, where school namesakes range from neighborhood subdivisions to founding fathers and literary figures like Edgar Allan Poe, board policy states that an individual must be dead if a school is being named or renamed after them.
For example, Agnes Cotton Academy opened in 1923 and was named after a longtime San Antonio teacher who died in 1922.
Other districts lay out different rules based on a school’s grade levels: elementary, middle and high school.
While school boards often have final naming and renaming rights, name changes are often community-led, like at North East ISD, where a student-organized petition led to changing Robert E. Lee High School, originally named after the Confederate general, to LEE High School in 2017.
LEE now stands for Legacy of Educational Excellence.
SAISD also has a history of severing its ties with Confederate names.
In 1989, SAISD moved Jefferson Davis Middle School, named after the Confederacy’s first and only president, from its original site on Holmgreen Road to its current location on E. Houston Street on the East Side of San Antonio.
After facing backlash from the community there, SAISD changed the school’s name in 1991 to S. J. Davis Middle School, in honor of Stonewall Jackson Davis, the district’s first Black board member, not to be confused with a Confederate general of the same name.
But not all school and facility name changes spark from controversy, like in the case of the Sylvia Cardenas Gym in Harlandale ISD, which was renamed to honor a beloved volleyball coach and alumnus who died last year.
Honoring the locals
Elementary schools in San Antonio have the most locally rooted names, usually named after the neighborhoods they’re in or after local heroes ranging from past politicians to civil rights attorneys and dedicated educators.
In 2012, Northside ISD renamed Lackland City Elementary School to Allen Elementary School.
Originally named after its proximity to Lackland Air Force Base, the school was renamed in 2012 to honor retired principal Jerry Allen.
Other elementary schools named after local heroes in NISD include Mora Elementary School, named after a school alumnus, and Chumbley Elementary School, named after a former trustee.
This year, Southwest ISD is opening a new elementary on the far South Side. Juan M. Alvarado Elementary is named after the district’s first Hispanic trustee, who ran for office after years of serving in the parent-teacher association and advocating for more resources as his child’s school.
Even though SAISD’s elementary schools are typically named after prominent state figures, a handful of names cement the legacies of local leaders like G.W. Brackenridge, a San Antonio businessman and philanthropist who is also the namesake for Brackenridge Park, and Cotton, a longtime teacher who dedicated 50 years of her life to education in San Antonio during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
North East ISD has one of the most straightforward elementary school naming policies, only using a school’s corresponding street or neighborhood. Such schools include: Caste Hills Elementary, Dellview Elementary, Fox Run Elementary and Olmos Elementary.
Odes to literary figures
Established in 1899 and the oldest of the San Antonio-area school districts, SAISD has perhaps the widest range of schools named after historical national figures.
SAISD’s traditional high schools usually bear larger-than-life historical names, like those of American founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, influential horticulturist Luther Burbank and Texas revolutionary Sam Houston.
But SAISD also has a long literary name history.
When opening several new schools in the 1920s, district officials decided to name its elementaries after “outstanding heroes of Texas history” and its then-junior highs — which are now called middle schools — after “outstanding writers of American literature,” according to a San Antonio Express-News story from 1923.
While several of SAISD’s schools have now been closed, repurposed or go by different names, several names with ties to American literature and writing still stand: Edgar Allan Poe Middle School, Washington Irving Dual Language Academy, Booker T. Washington Elementary School, and more.
There has also been some flip-flopping on names at SAISD, like in the case of Davis Middle School.
When Brackenidge High School opened in 1917, it was first named after George Washington Brackenridge, who founded the San Antonio National Bank and developed the city’s first water system.
But the school was renamed to the Phyllis Wheatley High School in 1974, after the first Black female poet in the United States. Then, SAISD changed it back to Brackenridge in 1988.
Wheatley’s name was then transferred to an East Side high school, which later turned into Waldo Emerson Junior High, then Emerson Middle School, and is now SAISD’s Young Men’s Leadership Academy.
A just name
Unlike SAISD, Northside ISD doesn’t require someone to be dead to have a school named after them, but it follows the same pattern of giving weightier names to larger schools.
High school names, for example, are pulled from a very narrow, but significant list of national figures at NISD.
The district’s first high school opened around 1950 as Northside High school, but was later renamed John Marshall High School in 1960, after the longest-serving Chief Justice of the United States (1801-1835).
Opened in 2022, Sonia Sotomayor High School is NISD newest campus, named after the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, sworn into office in 2009.
Other high schools include Earl Warren High School, William H. Taft High School and Sandra Day O’connor High School … all past Supreme Court justices.
Yes, NISD only names high schools after Supreme Court justices, past and current.
When opening a new high school, NISD asks eighth-graders who will attend the new campus to pick a Supreme Court Justice they like, write a report on them and present it to the school board for approval.
Using SCOTUS for high school names is a longtime NISD tradition, set in stone since the district’s first years of existence, but it didn’t become an official district policy until September 2025.
The future of school names
Future schoool names could be less honorific, as the education landscape changes and school districts embrace career and technical education and other specialized programs to attract and retain students from across the region, not just those in their attendance zone.
The names of schools following those new trends are often straightforward, to draw in students.
NISD, for example, is opening a new virtual high school this fall, named simply Northside ISD Virtual Academy. NISD also houses a longtime popular magnet high school that puts students on early medicine tracks named Health Careers High School.
Other district similarly name their school choice programs and magnet schools to highlight what they offer.
Charter schools are usually named after their founding networks — like IDEA, Jubilee, SST, or KIPP — with campuses distinguishing themselves by geographic location.
Several school districts also partner with local education nonprofit CAST Schools, with each campus focusing on different industries and pathways, using simple names that quickly convey what those focuses are: CAST Teach, CAST Med, CAST STEM, etc.
The future of school names could also be shaped more aspirational virtues than history, as seen in one area-school district.
Unlike almost the rest of San Antonio, East Central ISD is in the unique position of opening and naming new schools to keep up with booming student enrollment.
ECISD has opened a new school almost every year in the last few years, and new schools also come with interesting names that break from the tradition of naming a school after a person.
“Tradition” is actually one of ECISD’ school names. Opened in 2018, Tradition Elementary School serves around 600 students in a little town right outside of San Antonio called St. Hedwig.
ECISD is also home to Heritage Middle School, Legacy Middle School, Valor Middle School and Honor Elementary School.
This year, Victory Elementary School is joining the bunch and opening its brand-new doors when the school year starts in August.
Soon, ECISD’s board will have to pick a new name for its second comprehensive high school, set to open in 2028 and currently under construction.
In May, a spokesperson for the district said ECISD put together a naming committee from district employees, parents, community members and students, and hinted that High School #2, a $208.9 million project that voters approved in 2025, might not continue the one-word, aspirational name trend.
But then ECISD officials did what several districts tasked with naming publicly funded facilities have done: they opened the door for more community input, and two rounds of online surveys that closed in June made it clear that the people of ECISD might not want to name the school after a person or place.
The school board will probably have from these names to pick from for a soon-to-be alma mater, though the names could always change based on the committee’s recommendations.
So far, the recommendations for High School #2 include Beacon, Journey, Lakeview, Legend, Liberty, Summit and Vanguard. Most of the names are aspirational, but one is situational — the new campus will be located near Victor Braunig Lake on the Southeast side.
