Arvada High School is a public secondary school

Secondary school

Secondary school is a term used to describe an educational institution where the final stage of schooling, known as secondary education and usually compulsory up to a specified age, takes place...

 operated by Jefferson County School District R-1 in Arvada, Colorado

Arvada, Colorado

The City of Arvada is a Home Rule Municipality located in Jefferson and Adams counties in the Denver metropolitan area of the U.S. State of Colorado. Olde Town Arvada is located northwest of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver...

, United States.

Demographics

Arvada High constitutes following racial demographics:

Race	Percentage
Hispanic White Hispanic and Latino Americans White Hispanic and Latino Americans are citizens and residents of the United States who are racially White and ethnically Hispanic or Latino.White American, itself an official U.S...	33.4%
White	56.8%
African American African American African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...	2.0%
Asian Asian American Asian Americans are Americans of Asian descent. The U.S. Census Bureau definition of Asians as "Asian” refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan,...	5.8%
Native American Native Americans in the United States Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...	2.0%

History

The first high school classes in Arvada commenced in 1900 at Zephyr and Grandview. Known as the Arvada School (it was renamed Lawrence Elementary School in 1955), Arvada high school students attended classes there until a permanent high school was built in 1920. The first Arvada High School was located at 7225 Ralston Road and served high school students until 1955. The building served as a junior high school until 1984 and was demolished in 1986. A new building at 5751 Balsam Street served students until 1971, when the school's current building was completed at 7951 W. 65th Avenue and the Balsam Street location became Arvada Junior High School.

In the early 1920s, the school adopted the team name Redskins. It was challenged in 1993 as derogatory and the new name Reds was adopted by a 2–1 margin in voting. The school subsequently adopted a bulldog

Bulldog

Bulldog is the name for a breed of dog commonly referred to as the English Bulldog. Other Bulldog breeds include the American Bulldog, Olde English Bulldogge and the French Bulldog. The Bulldog is a muscular heavy dog with a wrinkled face and a distinctive pushed-in nose...

 as its new mascot.

Curriculum

Since 2006, Arvada High School has been home to the district's North Area Option School, an extremely rigorous college preparatory program. Many advanced placement classes are also available. Program classes are taught by Arvada High School instructors and 50% of the available enrollment is for Arvada High students.

Extracurricular activities

Arvada High School fields teams in interscholastic competition in baseball, basketball, cross country

Cross country running

Cross country running is a sport in which people run a race on open-air courses over natural terrain. The course, typically long, may include surfaces of grass and earth, pass through woodlands and open country, and include hills, flat ground and sometimes gravel road...

, golf, soccer, softball, swimming, diving, tennis, track and field

Track and field

Track and field is a sport comprising various competitive athletic contests based around the activities of running, jumping and throwing. The name of the sport derives from the venue for the competitions: a stadium which features an oval running track surrounding a grassy area...

, volleyball and wrestling. Active in the performing arts with a band choir, orchestra

Orchestra

An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...

 and theater program. The band program includes marching band

Marching band

Marching band is a physical activity in which a group of instrumental musicians generally perform outdoors and incorporate some type of marching with their musical performance. Instrumentation typically includes brass, woodwinds, and percussion instruments...

, percussion ensemble

Percussion ensemble

A percussion ensemble is a musical ensemble consisting of only percussion instruments. Although the term can be used to describe any such group, it commonly refers to groups of classically-trained percussionists performing primarily classical music. Percussion ensembles are most commonly found at...

, jazz band

Jazz band

A jazz band is a musical ensemble that plays jazz music. Jazz bands usually consist of a rhythm section and a horn section, in the early days often trumpet, trombone, and clarinet with rhythm section of piano, banjo, bass or tuba, and drums.-Eras:SwingDuring the swing era in the mid-twentieth...

, and concert band. Carissa Duran is the band director.The school also has an award winning journalisn program. Both the school newspaper (The Crimson Report) and yearbook (The Arvanda) have wan awards from The Colorado High School Press Asscociation CHSPA. Along with the newspaper and yearbook the journalism program also has an broadcast journalism class known as BDN (Bulldong News).

Notable alumni

• Tagg Bozied
  Tagg Bozied
  Robert Tanios Taggert "Tagg" Bozied is an American professional baseball first baseman. He was an All-American college baseball player as well as member of the United States national baseball team.-Personal:...
  
   (1997), professional baseball player
• Joanne Conte
  Joanne Conte
  Joanne Conte served as a councilwoman in Arvada, Colorado from 1991 to 1995. She earned her master's degree in political science from the University of Colorado. Conte was born male and underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1973. She is noteworthy for being part of a small group of transsexual...
  
  
• Katee Doland
  Katee Doland
  Katee Doland-Mink is a former beauty pageant titleholder who represented Colorado in Miss Teen USA 1998, Miss USA 2001, and Miss America 2004....
  
  , Miss Colorado 2003
• Chris Sanders (1980), animator, co-director of Lilo & Stitch
  Lilo & Stitch
  This article is about the movie. For the television series, see Lilo & Stitch: The Series.Lilo & Stitch is a 2002 American animated feature produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released on June 21, 2002...
  
  
• Steve Saunders, KMGH weekend morning news anchor