Week 16: The Chandler School District Beginnings

Chandler High School celebrated a centennial in 2014. The celebration gives us a good excuse to look at some of the highlights in Chandler’s education history.

The subdivision of Dr. Alexander J. Chandler’s 18,000 acre Chandler Ranch occurred in October, 1911. The subdivision plans called for farm lots of 5, 10, 20, 40, 80, and 160 acres, a central townsite, and, notably, land set aside for a school. In order to serve students in the area before the school was finished, a temporary school was set up in a tenthouse – a wood frame building with wood slat sides and a canvas roof. Seven students attended school there when it opened.

Construction of Chandler’s first permanent school building began in February of 1912. Within a month of Chandler’s founding that May, residents of the new town were calling for revisions to the school plans. Such a large number of people moved to Chandler that the planned school was already too small to serve the area’s 150 students. A special bond election was called in June - four months before the school opened - to approve funding to expand the building. The bond question to approve $8,000 to expand the school was approved unanimously – all 22 votes cast were “yes.” The Chandler Arizonan suggested that the low voter turnout was a result of all residents recognizing the need for the bond and counting on their neighbor to turn out and cast a yes vote for him.

With the completion of the school’s expansion in 1913, Chandler turned its collective eye toward its high school students. In 1914, a special election was called to ask Chandler voters whether or not to secede from the Mesa High School District and form their own high school district. The question was approved, and Ella Page Seward served as the first principal of Chandler High School. Chandler’s first high school class graduated on May 29, 1918. The graduation ceremony was held in the arcade at the San Marcos Hotel. Three students graduated in that first class.

Four years later, in 1922, Chandler High opened with much celebration. The modern building, designed in the Classic Revival Style, boasted 30 classrooms, including full physics and chemistry laboratories. A 1,000 seat state of the art auditorium with beautiful acoustics was also built on the school grounds. Designed to be semi-fireproof by the Southern California architecture firm of Allison and Allison, it was constructed using over 1.75 million bricks, 3, 750 barrels of cement, and only 70 linear feet of wood. Chandler High featured an electric clock and bell system that could ring in every classroom, or allow the office to buzz into an individual classroom. A telephone system connected every room to a switchboard in the main office. The entire cost for construction of the new high school was $250,000. Chandler High is the oldest, continuously used school in the state. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

Over the years, several additional buildings have been added to the school – gymnasiums, music buildings, the industrial arts building, and a television studio among them. The school district partnered with the City of Chandler to build the Chandler Center for the Arts on the high school campus.

Through it all, Old Main continues to hold a special place in the heart of the Chandler community.