Description
Atherton High School is a public school in the Highlands district of Louisville, Kentucky and is part of the Jefferson County Public School district. It opened in 1924 as J.M. Atherton High School for Girls at 1418 Morton Avenue. It is named after John McDougal Atherton, a local businessman and politician who was instrumental in changing Louisville's school system administration from trustees to a board of education. The school became coeducational in 1950.
Atherton High School originally opened in 1924 as an all-girls school. It became coeducational and adopted the rebel mascot in the 1950s. Historians say the mascot was challenged in the 1970s, and as a result, the design was changed to reflect a soldier in the revolutionary war.
"We were always told it was the rebels from the Revolutionary War," Fauver remembers of her days at Atherton from the class of 1989. "I was raised to be a rebel, as in you fight against the system if you don't think it's just. But I do understand that's not what everybody thinks, and so that's why we're changing, so no kid feels like they shouldn't be there."