Hoover High School

Hoover High School is a four-year public high school in the Birmingham, Alabama suburb of Hoover. Hoover replaced the former W.A. Berry High School. It is one of two high schools in the Hoover City School System and one of three International Baccalaureate schools in the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area. The school colors are orange, black, and white, and the athletic teams are called the Buccaneers. Hoover competes in AHSAA Class 7A athletics. Hoover is the largest high school in the state of Alabama, with an enrollment of 2,770 students. It is known for being featured in 2006 in the MTV reality television series, Two-A-Days. History The origin of Hoover High School traces back to one of the older Jefferson County Schools, W.A. Berry High School. In the late 1960s only two high schools existed "over the hill" of Red Mountain and the further south Shades Mountain. These were Shades Valley High School established in Homewood in 1948, and Mountain Brook High School established in 1966. Shades Valley, also a Jefferson County School, began to rapidly grow in the late 1960s from a large population of people moving south of Birmingham. Mountain Brook was not growing near as rapidly due to high living cost and having an independent school system since their inception in 1966; prior to this, Mountain Brook was zoned for Shades Valley's pattern. To offset the rapid student body growth in the city of Vestavia Hills, Cahaba Heights, now a neighborhood in Vestavia Hills, the unincorporated communities of Hoover, Bluff Park, and other unincorporated communities, Jefferson County Schools created a new school zone for the southern area of the county. W.A. Berry High School was built originally as an elementary school off of Columbiana Road in Hoover, opening in 1959. A grade was added every year starting with the seventh grade until the first high school age grade was added in 1962, with the last grade added in 1965, two years before the city of Hoover incorporated. However the cities of Vestavia Hills and Homewood began to question the logistics of financially supporting independent systems, with both separating from Jefferson County Schools in 1970 to create Homewood City Schools and Vestavia Hills City Schools, creating the independent Vestavia Hills High School in 1970 and Homewood High School in 1972. This pulled some of Shades Valley and Berry's feeder schools, including Pizitz Middle School which was a feeder school for Berry.