[4] It originally opened as a beige stucco building with a red-tile roof and unreinforced concrete, giving it a Spanish-style appearance.

As part of a tradition related to signing their yearbooks, 12th grade (senior) students climbed a tower that became a signature defining aspect of the campus.

[3] As of 2004, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Douglas Williams, the authors of Five Years Later, stated that before 1998, Hoover had been known as the "ghetto school" of San Diego USD, and that schools with higher academic performances poached the best students from Hoover.

[8] Circa 2000 Berman,[7] by then a California Department of Education employee, wrote an independent review of the changes made at Hoover.

Burt Nestor, a member of the Hoover class of 1946, gave the school a 2-square-foot (0.19 m2) chunk of an ornamental archway from the original building.

[3] In 2015 Michael Shefcik, the supervisor of plant operations at Hoover, discovered that a sculpture in the library was actually a 1940 30-inch (760 mm) Works Progress Administration (WPA) statue, titled Girl Reading and created by Donal Hord, depicting a girl reading a book.

[2] In 1999 the school had a 444/1000 Academic Performance Index (API),[8] the lowest score in San Diego County.

[9] The Gates-MacGinitie reading assessments at this school resulted in a 5.9 grade level equivalent for the average student.