Henry M. Gunn Senior High School is one of two public high schools in Palo Alto, California, the other being Palo Alto High School. Established in , Gunn High School was named after Henry Martin Gunn, who served as the Palo Alto superintendent from 1950 to 1961. In 1964, the Palo Alto Unified School District announced that it would name the district's third high school after him. The Class of 1966 was the first class to graduate from Gunn High School. 1,993 students attended the school in the 2019–2020 school year. In 1992, the school was honored as a California Distinguished School. History The land under Gunn High School was purchased by the school district from Stanford University for $358,641 (), under the condition that it could not be sold to another entity. Gunn High School opened in August 1964 with an initial enrollment of 600 students, comprising 300 sophomores and 300 juniors. It was named after Henry Gunn, the superintendent of the Palo Alto Unified School District from 1950 to 1961. Students were drawn from Terman Middle School and from the other two PAUSD high schools then open—Palo Alto High and Cubberley High. The 974-seat auditorium was named in 1965 after Karl Spangenberg, a recently deceased school district trustee. The school held its first football game in 1965, with Cubberley High. The 1966 class was first to graduate. Gunn High School received national attention in 2009 after four of its students committed suicide over a span of seven months, mainly by walking in front of trains at a nearby crossing. Over the period of 2006–2016, the school's suicide rate was four to five times higher than the national average. In 2017, a senior student committed suicide. In the past decade, attempts have been made to improve the emotional health of students attending the school. Academics Gunn offers 22 Advanced Placement (AP) classes and 8 Honors classes which are included in the weighted Grade Point Average (GPA). In May 2010, 658 students took 1820 AP tests. 93% scored 3 or higher and 54% scored a grade of 5. Gunn no longer ranks students, but ranking was previously recorded by decile. Hanna Rosin wrote in a 2015 The Atlantic article that due to the emphasis on academics and competition between students, Gunn became "an extreme distillation of what parents in the meritocratic elite expect from a school." Around that time, families