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Mount Prospect Schools in the 1950’s
The baby boom in Mount Prospect during the 1950’s created a need for a additional schools. The decade of the 1950’s witnessed the construction of six separate schools within the town of Mount Prospect. The first new school to be built was the Lincoln Junior High School. This school was constructed with the help of two of the major developers who had created subdivisions around town. Axel Lonnquist and H. Roy Berry donated the land to district 57 in the late 1920s. This land was sold by District 57 to pay for the land that the school was placed on. The school opened its doors to 196 new students in 1950. The building of Lincoln Junior High helped ease the overcrowding problem in the second Central School which had been built in 1927. School District 57 was paying some of the highest salaries for teachers in the Midwest at the time due to the high demand for teachers in the Chicago suburbs.
Fairview School was constructed in 1953 along with St. Raymond’s School. Saint Raymond's was the first Catholic School in Mount Prospect. As a sign of the changing population in the community, the school was so popular that they had to have two sessions a day for students, some students came in the morning and left in the afternoon while others came in the afternoon and left before dinner.
The public school districts were expanding as well, Lions Park School was built in 1955, Busse School in 1956, and Sunset School in 1957. Most of these schools have been demolished as the baby boom in Mount Prospect has aged. Busse School was torn down in March of 1994 and Lions Park in 1995. Prospect High was built in 1957 at a cost of $3.5 million dollars. The new high school started with just a freshmen class in 1957 and added one class for each of the following years.