Clayton High School

Clayton High School is a public high school in Clayton, Missouri. History The first Clayton High School classes met on the upper floors of the Forsyth School beginning in 1908. In 1911, the school graduated its first class. Designed by William B. Ittner, the first Clayton High School building opened in September 1917 at 7500 Maryland Avenue. The building, which cost slightly less than $111,000 to construct and $14,000 to partially equip, included six main classrooms and a large study hall–library. The building also featured a chemistry, biology and physics laboratories, an art room, a music room, and several vocational and technical classrooms. The school also included a combined gymnasium and 700-seat auditorium. By the 1940s, however, the building was overcrowded, and the district considered multiple options for its replacement. Although planned to open in 1948, postwar supply shortages delayed the construction of a new building until the early 1950s. In 1952, the school building was sold to the department store chain Famous-Barr. The school was demolished for the store parking lot. The new building opened in 1954 at 1 Mark Twain Circle, and the first class graduated in 1955. At the start of the school's 1954 opening, the school's entrance featured a six-foot diameter granite globe sculpture weighing nearly ten tons. A block of ice was used to help set the globe in place. Accolades Clayton has been ranked among the top public high schools by Newsweek and has won national and state-level awards for quality. For the 1983–1984 school year, Clayton was nominated by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for the United States Department of Education Blue Ribbon school program; for the following year its nomination was accepted and it became nationally recognized. It was again named a Missouri Gold Star school in 1994–1995 and was nominated for the Blue Ribbon school program.