A SHORT HISTORY OF UNI HIGH
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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.
The Uni High Era Begins
The building finally opened its doors as a school on Sept. 12, 1921, welcoming 63 students and 14 faculty members.
The instructional program at the University High School was similar in most respects to high school programs throughout the central part of the state. For a tuition fee of $25 per semester, the same fee charged to University students, high school pupils could study English, the social sciences, mathematics, science, foreign languages, music, art and design, home economics and industrial education. Although there is no evidence that girls enrolled in industrial education in the 1920s, a one-half year course in home economics was offered for boys of junior and senior standing.
The new high school did not totally abandon the tradition begun by the Preparatory School: It offered a course in advanced algebra primarily for students who planned to enter the College of Engineering. Only three years of math were offered, but the four-year science curriculum included classes in general science, botany, zoology, chemistry and physics.
The 1922 Uni High graduating class of 15 students included seven who had transferred from high schools in Champaign and Urbana, two had come from Philo and the remainder, except for a student from Tennessee who was living with relatives in town, were from rural areas throughout Illinois. Their parents’ occupations ranged from elevator operator, postal clerk, dressmaker and watchman to engineer, surgeon and professor. Three students were children of parents associated with the University. Two were children of professors and one had a father who worked in the mail department at the University stadium.
A College of Education publication titled “Instructional Activities in the University High School” highlights the wide variety of educational techniques employed by teachers and the degree to which many staff members were student-oriented rather than simply subject-matter oriented.
The University High School Gymnasium was not constructed until 1926 at a cost of $30,000. Prior to that time, the South Attic was used for physical activities, and basketball backboards of some unknown vintage were just removed in 1996 as part of renovations of that space to improve acoustics and lighting for the orchestra, chorus and jazz band programs.
The Best-Laid Plans
Twenty years later, in 1943, plans for a new University High School building were under way. Although the project got no further than the planning stage, the preliminary scheme called for a structure that would have been one of the University’s most imposing buildings.
The basic plan for a new University High School goes back to 1937 when a proposal was brought before the Board of Trustees to extend Main Street through Illinois Field. The construction of a new College of Education practice school would then have been undertaken — moving the school from its present site about two blocks north and adding facilities for prekindergarten-age children. The southern part of Illinois Field would have housed the practice school, and the Men’s Old Gymnasium was to be assigned wholly or partially to Uni. The Gymnasium “Annex” was tentatively scheduled for conversion to some other use. The proposal suggested that the old University High School building be remodeled for the use of the College of Engineering or the Department of Journalism.
In 1944, the College of Education noted in a 17-page report:
“On the whole, the (Uni) building is not very satisfactory and in many respects inadequate for the educational program which this school is expected to provide. It is indeed too bad that a school of this design and purpose should be so handicapped in regard to a gymnasium, locker rooms, and showers …
“Lacking an auditorium, the University High School has been using a fourth-floor attic for this purpose. It is now necessary to question such use as a result of unsafe conditions reported by the University Fire Station. In view of the University’s obligation to follow the accepted public building codes, it seems that serious consideration should be given to discontinuing the future use of this area.”
Along with these criticisms of the present high school building, the College of Education also included in the report an outline of a proposed new site in what is now north of Illini Grove, the site of the Lincoln Avenue Residence Halls.
Preliminary plans called for a building of 225,000 square feet to house a nursery school, kindergarten, elementary school, secondary school, and the classrooms and administrative offices of the College of Education. The entire complex included two gymnasiums, one two-story auditorium, a swimming pool, and a cafeteria. Some members of the College also suggested the building of a junior college next to the laboratory school. Obviously, most of the changes called for in this proposal never moved beyond preliminary consideration except for the turning over of the Old Mens’ Gym (Kenney Gym) to Uni High for its physical education and athletics programs.
More recently, in December 1962, a College of Education committee reported that funds for a new school were urgently requested. The committee’s tentative plan called for an experimental school to accommodate an enrollment of 700 pupils from kindergarten to grade 12 on an unspecified 25-acre site. Like earlier proposals, this one also failed to materialize.