Buckeye Union High School School A-Wing

About this property

Buckeye Union High School is a public high school in Buckeye, Arizona under the jurisdiction of the Buckeye Union High School District. The first students in the town of Buckeye graduated in 1921. Regular graduating classes began the next year for what was then known as Buckeye High School, and there were 23 alumni by 1925. In its first few years, the high school used four rooms of the Buckeye elementary school on Sixth Street; the other four, on the other side of the building, were used for the lower grades. Finally, the towns of Buckeye, Palo Verde, Arlington, and Liberty came together with the goal of forming an accredited high school. In the fall of 1929, the new Buckeye Union High School (serving several elementary school districts) opened its doors with some 100 students. The school's mascot changed twice in the first ten years as the school's athletics program developed. A football team was first organized in 1923. The original name for the school's teams was the Wildcats at the creation of interscholastic sports in 1925, followed by the Buckeyes in the late 1920s, then the Hawks in 1929 (beating out Farmers in a schoolwide vote). Other traditions were being solidified: the school's first yearbook was published in 1925 (the yearbook title changed twice before the current "Falcon" in 1935). The original school song "Hurrah for the Blue and Gold" was written in 1924. The 1930s saw continued student growth; the enrollment was 229 by 1941, necessitating more facilities. In late 1929, a building blitz began: two wings, an auditorium, and a gymnasium. The WPA helped the school in the 1930s to build a shop and garage, dressing rooms for the auditorium, tennis courts, and a lit football field with bleachers. Buckeye Union continued growing; there were 280 students by 1950. A new football field came with the B building; a new gymnasium highlighted the middle of the decade; the front of the shop was partly rebuilt in 1959. By 1960, with 550 students, the district hired its first superintendent. Under Chester D. McNabb, Buckeye Union High School continued its expansion. Student traditions continued to evolve, with a new fight song ("BUHS, Hats Off to You") popularized in the mid-1960s. The C, D, and E wings helped to accommodate a student boom (832 students by 1975), a new library opened, the campus received landscaping, and the football stadium was expanded. The faculty size had nearly doubled by 1975. At the same time, in the wake of the passage of Title IX, girls' athletics expanded from just tennis to a fully featured program. The growth finally stabilized out at about 800 students in the 1980s and early 1990s, but bonds passed in 1980 and 1990 enabled the district to invest in updated facilities and a computer-networked campus. The expansion and modernization enabled Buckeye Union to handle a two-year bump of more than 100 students from 1993 to 1995. The new growth was unremitting, as Buckeye Union enrollment crossed the 1,000 mark.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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