Back in 1968, when West High had just been built, Ed Barker was appointed as the very first principal of the school. Barker was the principal for 11 years, from 1968 to 1979. When West was built, the students from City High needed to be rearranged to be properly distributed between the two schools. When Barker was the principal of West he wanted these students to feel safe and to initiate a strong school spirit.

“We needed to establish traditions… making the students feel welcome was an important part of our responsibilities. I knew that it was going to be a difficult transition for the high school students, especially the seniors, who would be transferred from City High to West High,” Barker said in the December 16, 2011 publication of the West Side Story.
He was so dedicated to this, in fact, he got a list of juniors that held high executive positions from City High’s principal and made a committee to help with the formation of West High. It’s pretty evident that Barker did end up achieving his goal since the older newspapers kept bringing up the successes of the school clubs, organizations, and events.

The way that the first students of West saw Barker was overall positive, as shown through the old West Side Story publications. One of the WSS staff members shared their thoughts on the principal in the March 23, 1972 edition of the West Side Story,
“Students sometimes are quick to barker up the wrong tree before realizing that Ed Barker rarely makes a decision in great haste and that sometimes making a decision is a painful process that deals primarily in much thought concentration. As usual, some students are also quick to forget that principals are not superhuman and that mistakes can be made. It is all part of human evolution.”

Paige Ringstrom, a West High alumni, stated in the December 12, 1972 edition of the West Side Story, “I didn’t realize while I was at West how fantastic a high school it really was. While I’ve been studying here in Miami, I’ve had the chance to see Miami’s public high schools. I am really thankful I went there…’’
There were many incidents where Barker was involved in as a principal. However, one that seemed extremely important since it was covered three times in the same publication of WSS. The incident was as follows, Barker took down two seemingly inappropriate drawings from cases made by a student, Brad Barnes.
The pictures were originally brought to his attention by an anonymous source, but the details of how the drawings were inappropriate were not discussed in the articles… Barker took the sketches down and replaced them with two drawings of the same size. The drawings had already been in the case for a week and seen by about 1000 people before Barker took them down. In the articles, the WSS emphasizes their concern about the action done by Barker, calling it censorship, “The decision to remove the works can be called nothing less than censorship. Will this type of action continue until it includes library books that contain material that is unacceptable to students? Or will Barker turn next to the WSS and censor stories and photographs he deems inappropriate?”
While Barker was principal he was very adamant about getting rid of the drug use and alcohol consumption at West. There was no shortage of incidents regarding these two activities since all of Barker’s experience being a principal at West was in the 1970s. These incidents involved everyone from players on the football team to random students in the parking lot.
When some of the football students were questioned by Barker after getting revealed to have been consuming alcohol they said that the questioning session felt like they were being interrogated by a detective. Barker even testified in a trial trying to uncover one of the distributors at West High in 1972. Luckily for him, the incidents seemed to go down over the years he was there.
The starting era of West High under the leadership of Barker is a long period full of events and development, an essence of it can be further observed in the West Side Story archives of the 1970s.

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