Shifting Student Profiles, Programs
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When Uni High opened its doors in 1921, the Board of Trustees set up three basic admission requirements: graduation from the eighth grade or evidence through examination or other means that the pupil could do satisfactory high school work; residence in the state of Illinois, and age not exceeding 21 years. Transfers were accepted.
Until the last 10 years when some 45 to 50 more students have been admitted to swell the student body to 296 students, the enrollment of the school has traditionally been limited to approximately 250 students. The curriculum reflects the size and, to a certain extent, the changing interests of the student body and the national priorities at a given time.
When the school first opened, it admitted students in a four-year high school program. As early as June 1926, however, a petition for a junior high school in connection with the University High School was signed by 38 citizens of Urbana and submitted to the President of the University.
The University President recommended the proposal be rejected, and the Board of Trustees concurred that summer. However, this early effort set the stage for the admission of Uni’s first subfreshman class — combined seventh and eighth grades — in 1932.
For a long while, the class consisted of only 20 to 25 pupils who had completed the first six grades. They were chosen on the basis of school records, scores on achievement and intelligence tests, and health examinations. In 1934, the U of I Board of Trustees ordered that each accepted subfreshman make a $5 deposit toward the $25 tuition fee to reserve his or her place in the class.
Subfreshmen were required to take English, arithmetic, social studies, industrial arts (boys), home economics (girls), music appreciation, and physical education. Their only elective was instrumental music. Although it may appear that the subfreshman program has remained relatively unchanged over the past 60 years, it actually has undergone radical revisions in content and methods through the years as a result of experimentation.
Occasionally, the subfreshman class has been required to participate in pilot projects such as the mandatory study of Latin in the late 1960s or the short-lived Form One experiment of the 1970s.
And, in 1932, a “Special Freshman Class” was admitted. It consisted of 20 to 25 pupils who had completed seven grades. These students had regular ninth grade subject matter and eighth grade essentials at the same time. They were required to take English, algebra and physical education and were given the choice of two electives from general science, French, Latin, ancient and medieval history, music appreciation, art and design, and home economics. Pupils who completed this course entered the regular sophomore class. The Special Freshman Class was discontinued in 1945.
In 1934, remedial classes in Reading and Arithmetic were established to give students special aid if they were weak in these subjects. The remedial classes were continued until 1940, when a new program called “Directed Study and Learning” was instituted. Directed Study and Learning Program class periods were 70 minutes long, with approximately one-half of the time spent in carefully planned, directed study led by the teacher.
A summer program of studies was offered until 1946. As an aid in oral work, a language laboratory was installed in 1962. Russian was introduced into the curriculum in 1963, followed by Japanese in the mid-’80s and Spanish, which was introduced in 1995.
With the hiring of Beberman as a mathematics teacher and the establishing of the University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics, Uni moved into national prominence as the proving ground for what came to be known as “The New Math” in the 1960s and 1970s. That tradition continues today as Uni leads the state in a curriculum-design program for bringing Mathematica software into classrooms all over Illinois via “notebooks” or examples developed at Uni and shared over the Internet. Of note is the fact that Uni alum Theodore Gray, Uni Class of 1982, was one of the creators of the now widely used Mathematica software.