Harding High School started in 1935, way back in the old days before I
was born. Harding was originally located to the best of my knowledge
near Irving Avenue. You probably heard about Dorothy Counts? This was
the school that she tried to enter but it was located on the other side
of town. At that time it was all White. Harding, the new plant, came
here in 1955 or 1957, and they moved it to this side of town. It
originally was a predominantly White school. In fact, I look at the
yearbooks and see how they have changed over the years. We have a
carload of yearbooks in the media center and I just discovered those
things there. It has changed gradually. Harding was located in a
neighborhood setting and the neighborhood around here immediately a
while back was predominantly White and the school was predominantly
White. It reflected the student body and over the years the school has
changed from White to Black. We are about 64% Black in the school.
Harding has one of the unique characteristics as does West Mecklenburg.
There are eleven high schools and there are only two high schools in the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System that have grades 9-12. Harding is
one of the schools. We have a population of approximately 900-1000 kids
which makes us not the smallest high school, Olympic being the smallest,
but we are the smallest if you take out the 9th graders we would be the
smallest high school. With the 9th graders, we are not the smallest high school. We have approximately 30-40 ADM positions,
17-19 vocational positions, and one of the unique things about us is we
have the BEH classes here, three units of BEH--two of self-contained
cross-categorical classes here and we have 50-60 students who are in the
resource program. So we have a wide, wide range of students. Our
socio-economic level is not the highest; it is quite low not only for
the Blacks but for the White students. We are very competitive based on
what we are dealing with based on our socio-economic ladder. One of the
other unique things about Harding is that we also has an evening school
that operates here. When we get ready to leave then the school is not
closed. Another set of students come in and this is a set of students
who come from all the surrounding high schools and may have been high
risk students or dropped out before who go to school here in the
evenings from 3-9 o'clock at night. Those are a couple of the
characteristics but basically we have always been known to be highly
competitive. We have Morehead scholars, we won the Field Houston award
for the last upteen times Harding has had either the male or female
recipient of that. We have been known to be highly competitive
athletically. Scholastically we are definitely improving. We have a
very, very dedicated faculty.