Oak Park and River Forest High School

Oak Park and River Forest High School, or OPRF, is a public four-year high school located in Oak Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. It is the only school of Oak Park and River Forest District 200.

Founded in 1873, the current school building opened in 1907. A comprehensive college preparatory school, OPRF has had a long history of not only turning out alumni who have made contributions in a wide variety of fields, but have consistently been eminently notable in their fields. Perhaps the most notable is Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway, whose writing career began at the school.

Throughout most of its history, the school has been a centerpiece of the Oak Park community, serving as host to a number of community events. Many of these events included lecturers and performances from many notable people from a variety of fields. Throughout the twentieth century, the school also was on the front lines of students rights issues ranging from fraternity/sorority membership in the early twentieth century, to the rights of homosexuals and African-Americans at the century's end.

Read more about Oak Park And River Forest High School:  History, Academics, Notable Staff

Famous quotes containing the words oak, park, river, forest, high and/or school:

    I could lecture on dry oak leaves; I could, but who would hear me? If I were to try it on any large audience, I fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. I should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Mrs. Mirvan says we are not to walk in [St. James’s] Park again next Sunday ... because there is better company in Kensington Gardens; but really, if you had seen how every body was dressed, you would not think that possible.
    Frances Burney (1752–1840)

    There are knives that glitter like altars
    In a dark church
    Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
    To be healed.

    There’s a woden block where bones are broken,
    Scraped clean—a river dried to its bed
    Charles Simic (b. 1938)

    The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    If I must choose which I would elevate
    The people or the already lofty mountains,
    I’d elevate the already lofty mountains.
    The only fault I find with old New Hampshire
    Is that her mountains aren’t quite high enough.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Parental attitudes have greater correlation with pupil achievement than material home circumstances or variations in school and classroom organization, instructional materials, and particular teaching practices.
    —Children and Their Primary Schools, vol. 1, ch. 3, Central Advisory Council for Education, London (1967)