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Prep School Origins

Home > About Uni > School Policies > Preface > Prep School Origins

In 1996, University Laboratory High School — or Uni as it is better known — celebrated its 75th anniversary. In truth, however, the actual beginning of the school was in the latter half of the 19th century, when a preparatory class for older students who needed some extra preparation before entering a college or university was started in 1876 in the basement of University Hall, located where the Illini Union now stands.

Preparatory school students had to be no less than 15 years of age and were required to pass exams in arithmetic, geography, English grammar, and U.S. history. The level of difficulty of these tests was said to equal that required for a second-grade teacher’s certificate.

The Preparatory School offered a one-year course of study,  and the cost of attending was a mere $5 in tuition and $7.50 in incidental fees.

In 1890, the U of I Board of Trustees was advised that the Preparatory Department could be eliminated as soon as adequate provision for doing its work was made by some public or private institution. Two years later, a proposal was made to the Trustees to establish a township high school for the cities of Urbana and Champaign. The proposition called for the University to give such a high school every support compatible with the interests of the University and the laws of the state. In June 1892, the Preparatory School was reorganized and tuition was raised to $10 per term but the Trustees took no further action on the proposal concerning a high school.

Despite much discussion concerning the phasing out of the Preparatory School, it continued through the end of one century and into the beginning of this one. In March 1901, U of I President Andrew S. Draper advised the Principal and instructors of the Preparatory School that their services would not be needed at the end of the 1902 academic year.

Soon after that announcement, in December 1901, President Draper recommended that the entity commonly called the Preparatory School be maintained by the University and be renamed the Academy of the University of Illinois. In June 1910, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teachers questioned the relation of the Academy to the University and apparently prompted the Board of Trustees to discontinue the Academy in June 1911.

The Board’s action also was tied to the U of I Faculty Senate discussion of the purpose and function of the Academy and its recommendation that the Academy be replaced with a training, experimental, and observational school for secondary grades which would serve as a laboratory school for the College of Education.

In April 1910, the College of Education and the forebears of what is now known as the Urbana-Champaign Senate asked the Board of Trustees for permission to establish a laboratory high school. In October 1910, a special committee of the Board of Trustees endorsed the construction of a separate building for the school of education, which contained a provision for a model high school. At that time, the committee asked for $250,000 for the erection of the building.

Because the building was to house a laboratory for the study of applied methods of teaching, school records tell us that many felt its location should be determined more by the area from which students of high school age were to be drawn than by its relation to any particular group of existing university buildings. In October 1913, the Board of Trustees appropriated $30,000 to purchase enough land on the block bounded by Springfield Avenue and Mathews Street to build a high school.

In June 1914, the first design for the school building was turned down, but in July, after extensive discussion, the English collegiate Gothic structure won approval. A year later, the supervising architect, J.M. White, estimated the cost of the building at $143,500. The building planned for completion in 1915 was an H-shaped structure with one wing planned to house classrooms, shops and laboratories of a senior high school (grades 10 to 12) and the other wing reserved for junior high school, grades 7 to 9. The auditorium and gymnasium for these two units, together with the offices, classrooms and other facilities of the College of Education, were to be housed in the connecting unit.

In short, the “wing” in which all 290-plus Uni High students attend classes today was not even the original complete senior high unit, let alone a complete junior-senior high school. The Board of Trustees gave the green light for construction of the west wing in May 1916 and groundbreaking took place in early 1917.

The first wing was completed and ready for occupancy by October 1918, but it was not immediately turned over to the College of Education. In its Oct. 16, 1918 session, the Board of Trustees discussed and approved plans to convert the building into a general hospital for the Students’ Army Training Corp and School of Military Aeronautics until the end of World War I.