Westminster School District


The Westminster School District is a school district in Orange County, California, established in 1872 and headquartered in Westminster. It operates schools in Westminster, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, and Midway City.
It operates elementary and middle schools. High school students after go to schools in the Huntington Beach Union High School District as well as in the Garden Grove Unified School District.

List of schools

Elementary schools

An important precursor to the desegregation of schools across the nation, the Westminster School District was the defendant in the groundbreaking litigation Mendez v. Westminster. Five Mexican-American families sued on behalf of thousands of students who were forced to attend substandard schools within the district. Ultimately, the court ordered the school district to allow students of Mexican descent to attend schools that had been previously reserved for only white students.
The case proved to be an important training-ground for Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall authored an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the NAACP in favor of integration and later argued the merits before the Supreme Court in Brown. After the Mendez case, Governor Earl Warren led the call for full integration of California public schools. Additionally, the untimely death of Chief Justice Vinson during the Court's recess and the ascendancy of Earl Warren to the position of Chief Justice made the favorable ruling in Brown possible.
In 2015, Westminster School District became the first school district in the State of California to offer a Vietnamese-English Dual Immersion Program. The program was first proposed in 2014 by Board Member Jamison Power, whose wife is Vietnamese-American. The program was implemented by the district's first minority Superintendent, Dr. Marian Kim-Phelps and the Director of the Office of Language Acquisition, Dr. Renae Bryant, after the board consisting of Jamison Power, Mary Mangold, Amy Walsh, Dave Bridgewaters, and Penny Loomer unanimously approved moving forward with implementing the program. In 2017, the program received the prestigious California School Boards Association Golden Bell award.