Payette High School
About Us
Our School
Payette High School serves grades 9 through 12 as part of Payette Joint School District #371, in Payette, Idaho. The district traces its beginnings to 1885 — when Payette was still part of Ada County and classes met in a one-room schoolhouse — and today it is home to four schools: Payette Primary School, McCain Middle School, Payette Academy, and Payette High School.
Around 320 students walk these halls, in a close-knit rural community with deep roots in agriculture and industry. Alongside its academic programs, the school offers career and technical education pathways spanning welding, construction, automotive technology, health professions, culinary arts, business, and agriculture — as well as the Pirate Theatre Company, choir, and marching, concert, and jazz bands.
The Dome
Payette is known across Idaho for its domed gymnasium — and it did not start life as a gym at all. The structure was originally a radar dome at the Baker Air Force Station in eastern Oregon. When that station closed, the dome was dismantled, moved to Payette, and raised again here in the early 1970s.
More than fifty years later it remains the landmark you see from the highway and the symbol of the school and the community that built it.
Pirate Athletics
The Pirates wear red, black, and white and compete in the 3A classification of the Idaho High School Activities Association, in District III's Snake River Valley Conference.
Payette fields teams in football, volleyball, soccer, cross country, basketball, wrestling, baseball, softball, track and field, golf, tennis, and cheer. The school's athletic field carries the name of its most famous graduate: Harmon Killebrew Field.
Pirates Who Went On
Born in Payette in 1936, Killebrew earned twelve athletic letters as a Pirate and was an All-American quarterback. He turned down a scholarship to the University of Oregon and signed with the Washington Senators in June 1954, at seventeen. Payette High School retired his uniform number, and he is buried here in Riverside Cemetery.
Served Idaho in Washington, D.C. as both a United States Representative and a United States Senator.
A Payette native who played basketball and ran cross country for the Pirates before going on to race in the IndyCar Series.
Our Town
Payette began as a railroad construction camp called Boomerang, built along the Oregon Short Line in the early 1880s. The settlement moved upstream and incorporated as Payette in 1891, taking its name from François Payette, the French-Canadian fur trapper who was among the first outsiders to explore this country.
When Payette County was created in 1917, the town became its county seat. Today about 8,100 people live here, on the Idaho–Oregon border near the confluence of the Payette and Snake rivers.