Carlmont High School


Carlmont High School is a public high school in Belmont, California, United States serving grades 9–12 as part of the Sequoia Union High School District. Carlmont is a California Distinguished School.
Carlmont has students from Belmont, San Carlos, East Palo Alto, Redwood City, and San Mateo.

History

Carlmont was founded in 1952 as "a school within a school" at Sequoia High School, with four hundred fifty freshman and sophomore students. On April 19, 1953, the school was dedicated to Truth- Liberty- Toleration. The morning after, the students arrived by bus caravan from Sequoia High School to occupy the newly built high school facility.

Name

Its name derives from the campus straddling the two adjacent cities of San Carlos and Belmont.
Because this hilly area is referred to as "the highlands", the school team was named "The Scots", and the mascot is a kilted Scottish highland warrior. The Carlmont campus was built on at a cost of about $2.5 million.

Statistics

Demographics

2015-2016
WhiteAsianHispanicTwo or More RacesFilipinoAfrican AmericanPacific IslanderAmerican IndianNot Reported
1,065398390133714434120
%%%%%%%%%

Standardized testing

Alumni

In 2014 and 2016, Scot Scoop News received the National Scholastic Press Association's Online Pacemaker.

''Dangerous Minds''

The novel My Posse Don't Do Homework by LouAnne Johnson and subsequent movie adaptation Dangerous Minds were based upon her experience as a teacher at Carlmont in the 1990s. In the film, the school was named Parkmont. Most of her students were African-Americans and Hispanics bused in to Carlmont from East Palo Alto, a town at the opposite end of the school district from Carlmont.
With the closure of Ravenswood High School in East Palo Alto in the early 1970s, instead of the school district complying with the Brown v. Board of Education and Mendez v. Westminster US Supreme Court rulings that a student is legally required to attend the closest school to their home, the predominantly African-American, Hispanic and Pacific Islander students were forced by the District to be bused to other high schools in the Sequoia High School District, including Carlmont, which had a predominantly Caucasian population at the time.
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area working with the law firm of Brigham McCutchen submitted a 34-page report to the District school board in July 2013 about the illegalities of forcing the East Palo Alto students to be bused to Carlmont and other High Schools, instead of attending their closest school, Menlo-Atherton, and in fear of a lawsuit, the District has slowly allowed East Palo Alto students to start attend high schools closer to home.

Transportation

Carlmont can be accessed by driving and Samtrans routes 60, 61, 260, and 295.