Saint Paul Central High School
Near Minneapolis St Paul, Minnesota
This is the oldest high school in Minnesota. It began in eighteen sixty-six, when about a dozen students in Saint Paul wanted to keep learning past the elementary grades. Two rooms were set aside on the third floor of an existing school building downtown, and that small experiment became Central High School.
It has been running ever since, longer than any other high school in the state. Over more than a century and a half, Central has sent some remarkable people out into the world. The aviator Amelia Earhart studied here.
So did Charles Schulz, who would go on to draw the Peanuts comic strip, and the baseball Hall of Famer Dave Winfield. From a dozen students in two borrowed rooms, the school now teaches more than fifteen hundred students. When it reached one hundred and fifty years, the whole city took notice.
