New Trier High School - History

History

New Trier Township High School was founded in 1901 in Winnetka, Illinois, with seventy-six students and seven faculty members. Chicago's north shore communities had decided to build a school that would enable parents to educate their children without sending them to college preparatory schools on the Eastern seaboard.

The school has been marked by a series of firsts and other notable events. In 1912, New Trier became the first high school in America with an indoor swimming pool. During World War I, New Trier became a training ground for soldiers. A student fundraising drive at the time led to the purchase of a field ambulance. In 1928, New Trier began its advisory system, the first such in American public secondary education, in which each student meets with one faculty adviser and the same fellow advisory students every morning throughout his or her career. Students sold tax warrants door-to-door in the 1930s to keep the school operating as the flow of property tax funds dwindled in the Great Depression. During World War II, students sold bonds to finance both a B-17 (The Spirit of New Trier) and a B-29.

In the 1950s, New Trier became the first American high school with an educational, non-commercial FM broadcast license for a radiated station (WNTH, 88.1 FM). By 1970 New Trier was home to the nation's first public high school-based CCTV instructional station, ITV, which broadcast educational programming to township elementary schools via microwave signals. Students operated WNTH under a faculty advisor, ITV was operated by students under professional television technical and programming staff.

By 1962, student enrollment was more than 4,000. Some 20 "temporary" trailer classrooms lined the rear of the building, which had been designed for 3,000. To accommodate the growing baby boom student body, voters approved a referendum for New Trier to purchase forty-six acres in Northfield. Chicago architecture firm Perkins and Will was selected to design a campus of curricular buildings clustered around a central library and administration building. The resulting modernist design was widely noted in secondary education architecture literature and practice, and emulated by Winnetka's Carleton Washburne junior high school several years later.

"New Trier West" opened to freshmen and sophomores in 1965. What had been "New Trier," at 385 Winnetka Avenue in Winnetka, became "New Trier East." In 1967, New Trier West was dedicated as a separate four-year high school. U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner keynoted the dedication, which was also attended by U.S. Senator Charles Percy ('37), and Congressman Donald Rumsfeld ('50).

Enrollment reached an all-time peak of 6,558 students in 1972. By 1981, enrollment had dropped significantly. As a result, the school board decided to combine the East and West schools and convert New Trier West into the freshman-only campus. The division of freshmen (at the former New Trier West) from upperclassmen (at the former New Trier East) lasted from September 1981 until June 1985. By then enrollment had declined enough for the board to bring all students under one roof, close the former New Trier West, and convert the Northfield campus into a community recreation space. The campus later housed a senior center, corporate dormitories, a public swimming pool, and an alternative high school program known as West Center Academy.

Jonathan Kozol wrote a book called Savage Inequalities in 1991 that discussed the harsh conditions in the poorest school districts in the United States, making a correlation between inequality and racial separation and segregation. In the book, Kozol contrasted New Trier High School's spending per student to impoverished schools within Chicago.

New Trier was featured in the December 9, 1996, issue of Time in an article entitled "High Times at New Trier High." Among other claims, the article stated that "New Trier kids who smoke pot" were "by all accounts more than three-fifths of the student body," compared with national averages at the time closer to 33%. However, on the school's WNTH's radio program, the writer acknowledged that the "three-fifths" claim had been inadvertently rewritten during the editing process in such a way that seemed to imply that more than 60% of New Trier students may be regular users of marijuana, whereas that figure should have been clearly labeled as the portion of students who had ever used marijuana, including many who had used it only once or twice.

In 2001, due to increasing enrollment, the Northfield campus reopened. The decision to make it a freshman-only campus was a compromise from a stalemate between plans to either increase capacity at the Winnetka campus or reopen the Northfield campus as a separate school. The Northfield campus also houses the administrative offices of the New Trier Township High School District.

In the late fall of the 2006–2007 school year, the school had an outbreak of pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough. There were approximately thirty confirmed cases among students and faculty members. A free vaccination clinic was offered at the school to curtail its proliferation.

In February 2008, a student broke into the school computer database, using his personal computer to obtain unauthorized access to the network. He took a faculty member's password and gained access to the student information system, obtaining grades for the then-current and last three graduating classes. The student also obtained ACT test scores for the class of 2008. The administration took disciplinary action against the student and he was later arrested by Winnetka police.

In the summer of 2008, Illinois state senator James Meeks made a public plea for parents of Chicago public school students to assist their children in skipping the first day of school (September 2), and instead attend a protest at New Trier that involved attempting to mass enroll students there. The protest was over inequities in school funding between schools in Chicago and New Trier. New Trier administrators were supportive of the protest. Students were greeted by cheerful parent volunteers to register at the Northfield Campus. After a relatively quick and peaceful registration, the buses left.