History of Rogers High School
In 1938, Toledo native Robert S. Rogers was elected to the Adams Township School Board. Frustrated by the fact that the township's teens were forced to attend high school in neighboring districts, Rogers advocated construction of a township high school – not just for the sake of convenience, but to create community in the township.
Rogers died in 1944, but his dream came to fruition in 1956 when 500 students walked into the school named after him at the corner of Nebraska Ave. and McTigue Drive. At the time, it was everything educators, students, and families could want for their suburban, nearly rural, community. Rogers High indeed provided a common identity for the Adams Township community – to the point where Joseph's Supermarket donated a rambunctious live ram ("Bunky") as the school's mascot!
What Rogers couldn’t have dreamed was the growth of the neighborhoods flanking Reynolds Road as Toledo's economy boomed after World War II. By 1964, Adams Township entered into an annexation agreement with the City of Toledo, and in 1966 Rogers High School was reborn as a Toledo Public School – complete with a million dollar expansion that included the city's only high school planetarium, a spacious library, cafeteria, and a gargantuan West Gymnasium that was the envy of the City League.
As the children of the post-war Baby Boom grew, so did Rogers High School. By the 1970s, Rogers had adopted a split schedule to accommodate some 2,400 students. In 1976, the building was expanded a third time with the state-of-the-art Rogers Skills Center added onto the front of the building. In 1980, the school absorbed the majority of the students of the former Spencer-Sharples High School several miles to the west after numerous attempts to merge the Spencer-Sharples Local School District with neighboring, predominantly white, districts failed. This was a pattern that in 1975, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare would say violated U.S. civil rights laws and created a segregated district. Rogers also absorbed a fair amount of DeVilbiss and Macomber students in 1991 when TPS closed both of those buildings.
Demolition of the old Rogers High School began in October 2007 and finished in February 2008.
The new Rogers High School (built as part of Toledo Public Schools' "Building for Success" program) opened in 2006-2007 on McTigue Drive (while the new McTigue Middle School near Rogers opened on Nebraska Drive in September 2007).
Read more about this topic: Rogers High School (Toledo, Ohio)
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