Overview
Northside High School is a public high school on Quitman Street in Houston's Near Northside, part of Houston Independent School District. Its colors are purple and gray and its mascot the Panther. Its feeder schools include Gregory-Lincoln Education Center and Travis Elementary School.
The school was formerly named Jefferson Davis High School. Alumni recorded by Wikipedia include the singer Kenny Rogers and Jesse Valdez, a competitor at the 1972 Olympic Games.
Academics
No school-specific Texas Education Agency report-card data was located for this profile. Check TEA's school report cards directly for current results.
Neighborhood
Near Northside is a historic neighborhood within Houston's larger Northside area, close to Downtown Houston. It has been majority Hispanic for roughly seventy years, having initially been settled by German American and Italian American immigrants between 1900 and 1940; development began in the 1880s-1890s alongside the expansion of the nearby Hardy Rail Yards. Preservation Texas named it to the state's most endangered historic places list in 2005, and the community was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
The neighborhood is also the site of a significant episode in Houston's civil rights history. On May 7, 1978, the area's Mexican American community protested the police killing of Jose Campos Torres, a war veteran killed while in what Wikipedia describes as dubious custody. The protests became a riot resulting in more than forty arrests, a dozen hospitalizations, and substantial property damage. Wikipedia records that the aftermath both deepened mistrust of police among Houston's Hispanic community and led to significant police reforms.
DoorProfit puts the neighborhood's population at approximately 30,391 with a median household income of $39,515.
Crime & safety
Two distinct neighborhoods with similar names appear in the crime data, and they are not interchangeable. Near Northside is where this school is located. Northside / Northline is a separate, larger area further north. Sources cover both, and their figures differ.
Near Northside (this school's neighborhood): DoorProfit gives it a crime score of B, describing it as having average crime relative to other Houston neighborhoods. Safemap rates it moderate overall, ranking it #66 of 87 comparable neighborhoods analyzed for walking safety, with parking and property safety rated "safe" and walking, living, and family safety rated "moderate." Safemap's temporal data shows incidents peaking at 14:00 and lowest around 5:00, averaging roughly 74 incidents per month, with a decreasing trend of approximately 45% over its analysis period.
Northside / Northline (adjacent, not this school's neighborhood): CrimeGrade grades violent crime D, placing it in the 18th percentile with a violent crime rate of 7.982 per 1,000 residents, and describes it as less safe than both the Texas and national averages. DoorProfit, covering the same area, grades it A-.
First, a provider contradicts itself within a single page. DoorProfit's Northside / Northline page states the overall crime index is 104 and that this is "4% above the national average of 100." One sentence later on the same page it states the index is 104 "compared to the Houston average of 109," meaning crime is "5% lower than the city average." Both are internally consistent. But the page then reports the violent crime index at 115 and property crime at 117 -- both higher than the overall 104 they supposedly compose -- while awarding an A- grade and the verdict "Yes — this neighborhood is safe." An area with violent and property indices 15-17% above the national average is being graded A-. As noted on the North Charleston profile elsewhere in this directory, this provider's letter grades appear only loosely coupled to its own indices.
Second, Safemap reports a zero. Its monthly data for Near Northside lists March 2026 as the lowest month at 0 incidents, against an average of roughly 74 per month and a peak of 125 in May 2025. A genuine drop from 74 to 0 in a neighborhood of 30,000 people is not plausible; a reporting gap or data-feed failure is far likelier. That matters because the same page reports a 45% declining trend, and a spurious zero would inflate exactly that calculation.
Our calculated rating
We don't publish a single proprietary score. Enrollment data is three years old, no academic data was located, and the safety sources include one provider grading an area A- while reporting elevated component indices, and another reporting an implausible zero. See our ratings methodology.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Northside High School (Houston)" (address, district, staffing FTE, 2022-23 enrollment, ratio, campus type, colors, mascot, feeder schools, former name, alumni).
- Wikipedia, "Near Northside, Houston" (neighborhood history, demographics, Hardy Rail Yards, 1978 Jose Campos Torres protests and aftermath, Preservation Texas listing, National Register listing).
- DoorProfit, Near Northside crime map (crime score B, population, median household income, comparison neighborhood grades).
- DoorProfit, Northside / Northline crime statistics (overall, violent, and property indices; A- grade; Houston average comparison).
- CrimeGrade.org, Northside Northline violent crime page (D grade, 18th percentile, rate per 1,000, state and national comparison).
- Safemap, Near Northside safety report (category ratings, neighborhood ranking, hourly and monthly incident patterns, trend figure).
- Niche, Near Northside reviews and crime and safety (resident reviews).
- Nextdoor, Near Northside crime and safety resource page (resident-reported incident types).
- NCES Common Core of Data records for schools named "Houston High School" in Alaska (020051000586), Tennessee (470015102001), and Mississippi (280020001536), and Sam Houston High School, San Antonio (483873004363) -- cited on the Texas state page for the name-collision caution.