The first Stafford High School opened in 1926. The school was located near the Stafford County Courthouse in what is now part of the Alvin York Bandy Administrative Complex. In 1952 Stafford High School and Falmouth High School merged into one school. Prior to the merge, the mascots for the respective schools were the “Pioneers” and the “Indians.” While Stafford High School was retained as the official name for the school, the mascot chosen was the “Indians.” The combined school was located in what is now Edward E. Drew, Jr. Middle School. It was the only Stafford County high school from 1952 until 1981, when North Stafford High School was opened.

In 1975, Stafford High School moved to 33 Stafford Indian Lane. This building was built with an experimental open concept design and thus had no windows and open classrooms that later had to be divided up with thin walls to make individual classrooms. A new building began construction in June 2013 just behind the existing school. The new Stafford High School opened to students on September 14, 2015. With the move to the new school, the address changed to 63 Stafford Indian Lane.

Desegregation of Stafford County Schools

On September 1, 1960, five senior students from the all-Black H.H. Poole High School (now the Rowser Building, five miles north of here) drove to the all-White Stafford High School (now Drew Middle School) in an attempt to desegregate the school. They were referred back to H.H. Poole, on a technicality, although the Supreme Court had unanimously ruled, six years earlier, in Brown vs. Board of Education, that school segregation was unconstitutional.

A year later, On September 5, 1961, Doretha and Cynthia Montague, enrolled in the first and third grades and integrated Stafford schools by entering Stafford Elementary School (today’s Bandy Building).  

Almost a year later, on August 26, 1962, 34 eleventh and twelfth grade students were transferred to Stafford High School en masse.

Three years later, on August 28, 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to over a quarter of a million people attending the March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

By 1964, desegregation was complete in Stafford’s public schools.

On December 7, 2021, Drew Middle School unveiled a mural marking that unsuccessful first effort to desegregate county public schools 61 years earlier. Two generations had passed, but three of those initial five students from H.H. Poole, the ones who got in that car and drove here in 1960, were present to see it.