Virgil I. Grissom High School

Virgil I. Grissom High School, more commonly referred to as Grissom High School, is a public high school in Huntsville, Alabama, United States with approximately 2000 students in grades 9-12 from Southeast Huntsville. The school was named a 2007 Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. In the Newsweek ranking of schools throughout the nation for 2015, Grissom High School was ranked second best in the state and 390th nationally. Grissom was the only high school in Huntsville to make the 2015 list.LocationThe school is located in Southeast Huntsville and serves an area of largely middle to upper-middle-class neighborhoods. The suburban middle schools within the area include: Mountain Gap Middle School, Challenger Middle School, and Whitesburg Middle School.HistoryGrissom High School was founded in 1969 and is named for astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, killed in the Apollo 1 fire at Cape Kennedy, Florida on January 27, 1967. Huntsville is home to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and has ties to the space program. At the same time, the Huntsville City Schools named Roger B. Chaffee Elementary and Ed White Middle School for Grissom's fallen Apollo 1 crewmates.