Norma C. O'Bannon High School (known as O'Bannon High School) is a

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...

junior and senior high school located in unincorporated Washington County,

Mississippi Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...

, USA, adjacent to Greenville. The school is part of the

Western Line School District The Western Line School District (WLSD) is a public school district based in the community of Avon, Mississippi, Avon, Mississippi (United States, USA). In addition to Avon, the district serves the town of Metcalfe, Mississippi, Metcalfe, a small ...

. The school includes students in grades 7 through 12.

History

Establishment

Norma C. O'Bannon High School (OHS) was established in 1950. The school is named after Norma C. O'Bannon, a career educator in Mississippi who was for many years the Superintendent of Washington County schools. Norma O'Bannon, was the Illinois-born daughter of a man who bought a

plantation A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The ...

Arcola, Mississippi Arcola is a town in Washington County, Mississippi. The population was 361 at the 2010 census. History According to linguist Keith Baca, the name ''Arcola'' may be derived from the Choctaw language meaning "jar". In the 1900s, Leroy Percy owned ...

. She began her career in 1921 at

Central School A central school was a selective secondary education school with a focus on technical and commercial skills in the English education system. It was positioned between the more academic grammar schools and the ordinary elementary schools where m ...

in Greenville, where she taught English literature, civics, and science at the junior high school level.Shaffner, "Interview with Norma C. O'Bannon,"] pg. 1. She later moved to elementary education, becoming principal at the city's Starling Elementary School. She became superintendent of Washington County schools in 1948, remaining in that position until 1968. O'Bannon saw a great period of great change during her tenure as superintendent, with Washington County's count of schools being reduced through consolidation from 96 small and segregated facilities to just 6 integrated schools.

Demographics

O'Bannon High School includes students in grades 7 through 12 — effectively combining a junior and senior high school in a single facility. The school has approximately 435 students, making it the 146th largest of the state's 249 public high schools. The student body of O'Bannon High School is 95%

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American ...

/Black and 3%

White American White Americans are Americans who identify as and are perceived to be white people. This group constitutes the majority of the people in the United States. As of the 2020 Census, 61.6%, or 204,277,273 people, were white alone. This represented ...

, with an additional 1% listing an ethnicity including "two or more races.""O'Bannon High School: Students and Teachers,"
Great Schools, www.greatschools.org/ Retrieved Sept. 24, 2014. These percentages differ significantly from the state averages of 50% black and 46% white for Mississippi public school students. Some 91% of OHS students are eligible for free or reduced price school lunches, in comparison to 71% of Mississippi students statewide. The disproportionately high percentage of black students at O'Bannon High School is a legacy of the segregation era, during which wealthy white plantation-owning families traditionally sent their children to out-of-state

boarding school A boarding school is a school where pupils live within premises while being given formal instruction. The word "boarding" is used in the sense of "room and board", i.e. lodging and meals. As they have existed for many centuries, and now exten ...

s, while poor whites attended fully segregated public schools.Cathy Hayden
"Delta Schools Search for Answers,"
''Jackson Clarion-Ledger,'' Dec. 21, 1999. With the coming of federally ordered efforts at desegregation in the 1970s, parents of white students, particularly in the

Mississippi Delta The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo ...

region, "fled en masse" from public schools to private academies, leaving the public school system in a state of ethnic and economic imbalance. Even in the 21st Century public schools in the Delta region remain predominantly black, with African-American enrollments frequently ranging from 80 to nearly 100 percent — far in excess of the state average.

Athletics

O'Bannon High School athletic teams are known as the "Greenwaves" and the school colors are Kelly Green, Scarlet, and White"O'Bannon High School: Home,"
MaxPreps, www.maxpreps.com/

Footnotes

External links