After World War II and into the 1950s, young men had more ample time and opportunity to look to their futures in a peacetime economy still dominated by industrial work, and as a result the enrollment in vocational schools on the West Side of Cleveland rose rapidly. During the war, the West Side division enrollment had averaged around 67 students, but by 1948 it had soared to 2,800 before leveling off at a slightly lower number in the following years. 

In 1952, talks began about opening a new trade school on Cleveland’s West Side. The school was proposed to be opened on West 49th and Detroit Avenue. The conditions of the other trade schools on the West side were growing overcrowded, and the old Cleveland Trade School on Eagle Avenue had nowhere to expand in its densely packed downtown block. The new school’s opening was seen as ideal because it would allow more space for the influx of new apprentices in need of space.

There was dispute over whom the new school would be named after. The choice came down to William Green and Max S. Hayes. Green was the former president of the American Federation of Labor and was a conservative figure compared to Max S. Hayes. Hayes was ultimately chosen as the namesake for the school because he was a more progressive figure who stood for workers as compared to Green, who leaned towards favoring greater union cooperation with labor management. 

Max S. Hayes was a Cleveland politician and writer in the early 20th century. Hayes was a member of the American Socialist Party and an advocate for workers’ unions and workers' rights in the city of Cleveland. The newspaper developed in 1891, named The Cleveland Citizen, was Hayes's ultimate mark on the labor and socialist politics in not only Cleveland and Ohio but in the entirety of the United States. The Cleveland Citizen was the first labor-focused newspaper in the United States. The paper concentrated on getting out information relevant to the city's working class. Hayes was also nominated as a candidate for Vice President of the United States on two occasions — once in 1900 under the Socialist Party and then again in 1920 as the candidate for the Farmer-Labor Party — but without success. 

Upon Max S. Hayes Vocational School's opening in 1955, it met with instant success. When the school opened, there were only young men in attendance who were split up into a three-group program. The largest group included 4,000 young men who attended both day and night classes and were already working in their field and now extending their education. The second group included 2,700 students who were apprentices. Another 325 of the students were high school young men who planned on working in the field after graduation and not attending college or university. Max S. Hayes Vocational School offered 22 programs, including bricklaying, automotive, barbering, plumbing, and the list goes on. 

The school has run very much the same since its opening. The primary changes have been the pivot from being a general vocational school to a school only for high school age students, and the expansion of young women also being able to attend the school. However, Max S. Hayes High School no longer exists in its original incarnation. In 2015, it was relocated to a new building on West 65th Street just a few minutes south of the original location. With the funds available, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District decided to build a new Max S. Hayes High School in order to have an updated space with new facilities to better suit its current generation of students. The school still serves as a pull school that educates students from all over the city with the goal of training the next generation of workers in Cleveland and upholding Max S. Hayes's legacy.

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For nearly seven decades, the building that is now Shore Cultural Centre served as a public school. The Euclid Village School District built Shore High School in 1912-13 after it purchased land between Babbitt Road and East 222nd Street near where these roads converged at Lakeshore Boulevard in the heart of the suburban village. The three-story school was constructed at a cost of $42,500 and was paired with another new high school built near Euclid and Chardon Road, Central High School. Although Euclid remained a small village at that time, it stood on the cusp of significant growth as growing numbers of people moved to Cleveland’s first-ring suburbs. In its early years, Shore High School, like Central High, housed all grades. Only the top floor of Shore High School actually housed high school classrooms. Neither of the village’s high school buildings initially had an auditorium, necessitating the use of Euclid City Hall for graduation ceremonies.

By 1928, according to the Directory of Euclid, Euclid-Central and Euclid-Shore High Schools collectively served 615 pupils, a reflection of Euclid’s growth from about 2,000 to 12,000 people in the time since the schools opened. The directory also noted the strength of Shore High’s Musical Department, which staged many different productions, including “The Spring Maid” and “The Mikado.” The directory also claimed that Euclid had one of the largest village school systems in Ohio, a distinction that reflected the fact that Euclid was still two years away from being incorporated as a city. Shore High School’s continued growth led to the addition of eight new attachments to the original building over the next couple of decades. The school had known nothing but growth, so Euclid residents could only imagine more of the same.

Shore High School’s future became uncertain after World War II. With the suburb’s explosive growth, a new Euclid High School building opened for grades ten to twelve in 1949. As a result, both Shore and Central High Schools were converted into junior high school that housed grades seven to nine. The original Central High School building was demolished in 1968 following the construction of a newer building, while the original Shore High building continued to serve the district until Euclid began to experience population loss in the 1970s. With demand for classroom space receding, Shore Junior High School closed in 1982, leaving the 1913 building’s fate in question.

Thanks to the school building’s central location in the community, the city saw many offers over time by people who wanted to redevelop the land. However, the people of Euclid decided instead to recast the building as a community center. Shore Cultural Centre opened in 1985 and, following the school board’s sale of the building to the City of Euclid in 1989, it underwent a major renovation. Shore Cultural Centre reflected efforts by community leaders who had lived in Euclid for decades. One of them, Dolly Luskin, headed the effort to establish this center. Luskin had served on the school board for years in various leadership positions. She believed in the building’s potential as a place for teaching future generations about arts and culture while honoring a physical landmark from the city’s early years. Shore Cultural Centre preserves the memory of Shore High School as it provides cultural activities in the city. Its auditorium is the home of the Euclid Symphony Orchestra and serves other performing arts organizations, as well as some nonprofits and businesses.

Despite Shore Cultural Centre’s updated role in the community, it became the subject of debates about its utility. As early as 2007, some in the community argued that the building should be converted into some other use or sold to the highest bidder due to its land value. Ideas for what should be done with the building came from all angles, as seen in contentious local city council meetings. The problem, some argued, was that Euclid was pouring money into a facility that was losing more money than it made through renting its spaces. The city, which suffered a significant loss of its tax base after losing one-third of its population in the four decades after 1970, struggled in recent years to make needed repairs and improvements to the aging building. As a result, the city continued to troubleshoot the facility’s problems. By 2023, it had made some progress. Shore Cultural Centre received an earmark of federal funds to upgrade some of its infrastructure and was reportedly 93 percent occupied.

Shore Cultural Centre embodies the story of Euclid and, more broadly, of older suburbs. As a school, it rose from humble beginnings, grew with all the vigor of the suburb whose students it served. Then, as in many inner-ring suburbs, Euclid endured the deindustrialization and population flight to more outlying areas or even other states, leaving school facilities in excess of the need. The school’s reinvention was part of a wider effort to reinvest in the community, but like the city, Shore Cultural Centre continues to navigate toward the promise of a sustainable future for a historic asset.

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There was a time when there were no public high schools west of the Allegheny Mountains. When children living in the Midwest could only obtain a college preparatory education by attending private academies, the tuition for which only wealthy parents could afford. That all changed, however, in 1846 when Central High School, the first free public high school west of the Alleghenies, was founded in Cleveland. At first located in the basement of a Universalist church on Prospect Street (Avenue), it was afterwards for many years located in its own building near the intersection of Euclid Avenue and Erie (East Ninth) Street, just west of Scofield's boarding house.

While Central High School was accessible to all Cleveland children in its first few years of operation, it was not, after the annexation of Ohio City in 1854, very accessible to Cleveland children who lived west of the Cuyahoga River. Especially in an era when there were no motor vehicles to transport children to school and the bridges that crossed the river were far and few between. West siders petitioned Cleveland City Council for their own high school, but a state law restricted the city to only one public high school. According to several newspaper accounts, including one that appeared in the Cleveland Leader on June 12, 1910, it was A. G. Hopkinson, formerly principal of an Ohio City grade school for advanced students, who came up with the idea that building a "branch" high school on the west side would not violate the state law. City Council was apparently persuaded and, on April 7, 1855, it passed legislation creating east and west "divisions" of Central High School. Hopkinson became the first principal of the new west side high school, serving in the office until 1870.

Branch High School, as the west side division of Central High School was initially called, held its first classes on the top floor of Kentucky School, located on Kentucky (West 38th) Street near Terrett Avenue. In 1861, West High School-- by this time everyone had dispensed with the fiction that it was a branch of Cleveland's east side high school-- moved to a new building, constructed on a small parcel of land at the intersection of Clinton Avenue and what is today West 29th Street and Dexter Place, not far from Franklin Circle. It remained at this location for twenty-three years until a growing west side population created the need for a larger school, resulting in the purchase of land and the construction in 1884 of a large two-story red brick and stone school building at the intersection of Bridge and Randall Avenues. The west side's school age population continued to grow rapidly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, in large part as the result of the annexations to the city of West Cleveland and Brooklyn Village in 1894. The City responded, first in 1900, by building a second west side public high school--Lincoln High School-- at the intersection of Scranton Road and Castle Avenue, and then in 1902, by relocating West High School further to the west, on a larger site and into a larger three-story brick and stone building on Franklin Boulevard near what is today West 68th Street. (The school building at Bridge and Randall later became a commerce high school, then a junior high school, and was finally home to Lourdes Academy, a girls Catholic high school, from 1944 until 1971, the year the building was razed.)

West High School remained at its Franklin Boulevard location for the next seven decades. During these years its teachers and students preserved and continued many of the traditions and school organizations which had roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organizations like the Dorian Literary Society (1881), the Castilian Literary Society (1898), the Thespian Dramatic Society (1902) and the Clionian Historical Society (1902). At the end of every school year, the outgoing Class president passed to the incoming Class president a small wooden box called "The Casket," which contained metal tablets listing the names of graduating students from classes dating back to 1881, when the high school was still located on Clinton Avenue near Franklin Circle.

In addition to its peculiar traditions and organizations, West High was also notable as the alma mater of a number of locally and nationally prominent Clevelanders. For example, Mary Quintrell (Class of 1858), the first woman to run for public office in Cleveland--School Council in 1895. James Ford Rhodes (Class of 1865) and Albert Bushnell Hart (Class of 1870), both prominent historians and both honored with Cleveland schools named in their honor. Linda A. Eastman (Class of 1885), who, when named Librarian of Cleveland Public Library in 1918, became the first woman in the United States to hold this position in a library of such size and significance. Alwin C. Ernst (Class of 1899), founder of the accounting firm Ernst & Ernst, today Ernst & Young. Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd (Class of 1902), the highest ranking military officer to die in the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Lillian M. Westropp (Class of 1903) and her sister Clara (Class of 1904), pioneer women bankers who founded Women's Federal Savings and Loan in 1922. And New York Metropolitan Opera star Mildred Miller (January Class of 1943) and her husband University of Pittsburgh Chancellor and retired Air Force Brigadier General Wesley Posvar (June Class of 1943).

In 1970, West High merged with Lincoln High, creating Lincoln-West High School, a new high school with its campus on West 30th Street in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood. After the merger, the old West High school building on Franklin Boulevard continued to serve as home to West Junior High for an additional seven years until 1977, when it was torn down to make room for Joseph M. Gallagher Junior High, a new school named after a long-time member of the Cleveland Board of Education. With the razing of the old school buildings at the Franklin Boulevard site, and the razing of all of the other buildings that once served as its home, there no longer exist any buildings in Cleveland that stand as a memorial to West High, the city's first west side public high school.

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Cleveland, Ohio's northeast corner grew from a railroad stop in the mid 1800's to a vibrant community by the turn of the century. Few people resided in the area until the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad developed a line to Painesville and Ashtabula and placed stop number 11 in "Frogsville," a swampy area about ten miles northeast of the mouth of the Cuyahoga River along the Lake Erie shoreline. By 1863 twenty families lived in the area bounded by Collamer Village to the south and Nottingham Village to the east. The railroad stop grew from a place to switch engines to enter the central city to a multi-purpose maintenance and railroad switching operation. The railroad expansion in the area brought more population and by 1876, the railroad’s well regarded chief engineer, John Collins gave his name to the settlement. By 1899 the Directory of Collinwood listed its population at 3,237 residents.  At the turn of the twentieth century the community was responding to a growing need for schools. Originally a one room building on Collamer Avenue (now East 152 Street) and Waterloo Road served the neighborhood children. By 1864, a second red brick school was added serving all grades until 1889. That year, Clark School was built at Saint Clair Avenue and Clark Street (East 147 Street) to accommodate the growing student population. In 1892, Clark High School graduated its first class – one senior. 

Frank P. Whitney, a recent Oberlin College graduate, was hired as principal for 90 students at Clark. Frank grew up on a farm in Huron, Ohio, and spent two years teaching in the rural village of Wakeman. Following his first year at Collinwood, he rode his bicycle to New York City, boarded a steamer for England and explored English schools via bicycle for the summer. Upon his return he was appointed to lead Collinwood's schools as superintendent where he began to install programs inspired by his visit to English schools. During this same period, Cleveland experienced its initial wave of central and southern European immigrants arriving to work, live, and settle in ethnic enclaves throughout the city. Collinwood also experienced this phenomenon. The railroad line bisected the village and provided a valuable resource for factory development and transportation access. Areas north and south of the tracks afforded plenty of land to develop residential housing for the immigrant workers. Manufacturers sought inexpensive land adjacent to the rail lines and attracted the needed human resources, first from Cleveland to the west, and later more European immigrants into the developing neighborhood. The abundant construction and factory-style work suited the people who populated the region. The neighborhood mix of residential and industrial space defined the community’s character, it blended the immigrant workforce with the manufacturing boom. Several large corporations established factories to support Cleveland’s manufacturing leadership that emerged during the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.  Meanwhile, more students required more space. In 1907, South High School was dedicated on the site where Collinwood High School now stands. During that year, a tragic fire at Lakeview School took the lives of 172 students and two teachers. Cleveland annexed Collinwood Village and its schools were added to the Cleveland Public Schools in 1910. Mr. Whitney joined the school district as principal (West Tech), supervisor, and assistant superintendent before returning to his Collinwood "home" in 1926 as principal of the newly built Collinwood High School. During its first year, enrollment reached 3,488 students, Ohio’s largest school at the time. In less than thirty years, the school enrollment alone exceeded the neighborhood's entire resident population. The neighborhood reached its highest population census between 1930 and 1960. Whitney's influence continued with his leadership through 1941 as the high school thrived with high enrollments, dedicated faculty, and nationally recognized programs featuring health, citizenship, and character education and student guidance. "Railroader" football teams of the 1940s and Lady Railroader track teams of a more recent era, excelled on the track and in the classroom. Honors academics joined numerous extra curricular programs to provide students with Cleveland’s best educational opportunities throughout the new century. Collinwood continued to reflect developments of the larger Cleveland community. By the 1960s and 1970s, racial strife at the high school reflected community tensions. Its mix of people, manufacturing employers, schools, and social climate reflected the rise and fall story of the rust belt urban center and its school challenges.

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Glenville High School opened in 1892 on Parkwood Drive in Cleveland's east side village of Glenville. The student body grew so rapidly that even a series of early additions soon proved incapable of holding it, so a new Glenville High School building opened in 1904. Two years later, after Cleveland's annexation of the village, Glenville joined the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Following years of migration from the Woodland neighborhood to Glenville in the early twentieth century, the red-brick two-story school reached a 90 percent Jewish student body. As the neighborhood grew and African Americans began migrating to Glenville for jobs and housing, the demographic changed to 90 percent African American by 1950. Additions were constructed in 1911, 1922, and 1939 to serve the growing enrollment, but the school found itself overcrowded by the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1963, the school was well over its 1,608-student capacity with enrollment exceeding 1,900 students. To alleviate the problem, some Glenville residents were sent to nearby John Hay High School in Fairfax.

In 1963, Cleveland citizens voted to allow the Cleveland Metropolitan School District to receive a $55 million bond, from which $3.5 million went to build a new Glenville High School, since the present school at the time was old, small, and outdated (with its old science laboratories and equipment). The new Glenville High School opened for the new school year of 1966, located at its present day location of 650 East 113th Street. While the old school had one-way hallways, shared classrooms, and wooden floors, the spacious new school had large lecture halls, updated equipment, and a large gymnasium. Glenville High School had striking similarities to John F. Kennedy High School in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood. J.F.K. was built a year earlier, and as some Glenville alumni noted, the only difference from Glenville High School was that the blueprint was flipped, where the location of J.F.K. cafeteria was on the opposite side in Glenville High School. Glenville High School maintained a rivalry with J.F.K. High School in sports, as well as neighboring Collinwood High School. Glenville at the time was known for its track-and-field team, the Glenville Tarblooders. A "tarblooder" was a robot man, named after the men who "bled tar" from working on the railroads in the early 1900s.

Glenville High School has had notable alumni, whether it be athletes from Glenville's successful football team, politicians such as former Cleveland mayor Michael R. White and Howard Metzenbaum, actors like Steve Harvey and Ron O'Neal of Superfly fame, and the creators of Superman. In addition to its alumni, the school prides itself on its athletics, especially the track and football teams.

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On the morning of April 6, 1970, 350 to 400 whites, mostly students, gathered outside of Collinwood High School and began throwing rocks at the school, breaking 56 windows. Teachers told the 200 black students who attended school that day to go to the third-floor cafeteria for their protection. At 10:30 a.m., the white mob entered the school and went to the second floor. They damaged furniture, broke windows, and threw clubs at the school's music director. Afraid, the black students began breaking off the legs of chairs to arm themselves and blocking the stairs leading to the third floor with tables and chairs. Luckily, the white students left the school and the black students were escorted to buses to take them home. Teachers and policemen had to form a line in order to block the whites from attacking the students who were boarding. This was just one of many serious, racially motivated confrontations that took place in Collinwood over a fifteen-year period.

The first major incidents at Collinwood High School occurred in 1965, the same time the rest of the country was seeing racial clashes in schools. After the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, many schools in the South became places of protests and violence. Northern schools saw the same disturbances when they began to make efforts toward greater integration. In the case of Collinwood, industrialization not only increased its population, but also its diversity. According to a Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist, "with the passage of each year, the western fringes of the Collinwood area [were] being occupied by the Negro overflow from Glenville." This change in demographics, coupled with civil rights demonstrations, caused racial tensions to surface and intensify in Collinwood, particularly at the neighborhood's high school.

Finally, after fifteen years of violence in the country's schools, radical measures were being taken in some schools and by the federal government to stop the dangerous episodes once and for all. In a New York school, a committee was formed by the mayor to prevent future violence. Other schools suspended or expelled large groups of students for any racial confrontations and hired security force guards to keep the peace. In April 1969, Senator Robert C. Byrd asked Congress to pass a law that would make the disruption of any school that received federal aid a federal crime.

Cleveland's mayor Carl Stokes was prompted to follow these examples after the dangerous episode of April 1970. The mayor kept the school open but protected it with policemen backed by National Guard units in case a severe situation should arise. Nevertheless, Collinwood High School was still the scene of other racial clashes, the worst occurring in the fall of 1974. Three black students were stabbed in September of that year, and the next month another student was fatally shot by a sixteen-year-old white student. After these disturbing incidents, the racial violence at the Collinwood school began to dwindle.

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East High School was coined a "20th-century schoolhouse" when it opened its doors on November 26, 1900. The "original" East High was the talk of the town, as no other school in the city could compete with the grandeur of the $180,000 brick school building that opened at East 82nd Street and Decker Avenue. The present building, constructed just to the northwest of the original, was built in 1975 at a cost of $17 million. The Cleveland Metropolitan School District closed the school at the end of the 2009-10 school year as part of the District's Transformation Plan.

The original East High School initially offered only three courses of study — classical, English, and scientific. It was run much like a city, as students elected a senior classmate as "mayor" and nine "judges" from each class, a practice that gave East High some of its uniqueness. The motto "Noblesse Oblige" was adopted by East High's first principal Benjamin U. Rannells in 1900, providing the guidance that each graduating class carried on as it pursued life's endeavors. East High School was also known for its sports and won various titles and championships, both locally and statewide. "The Home of the Blue Bombers," with its blue and gold school colors, grew to more than 1,200 students within five years of its opening. "Eastites," as its students were called, proclaimed and believed in "nothing but the best."

Despite the fact that the new East High School was built in 1975 amidst a declining urban neighborhood, it continued to be the pride of the community until declining enrollment and security problems led to its closure in 2010. The vacant building, which suffered widespread damage at the hands of vandals and scrap thieves, underwent a $1 million renovation, reopening in 2013 as the East Professional Center, an administrative and training complex for a number of CMSD departments.

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The site of the North Royalton City School Board Offices and Gibson Field at Serpentini Stadium has been used by the community as school land for over 100 years. In 1908, North Royalton was a very different community than it is today, and this was the site of the village's first high school. Before the new school was constructed, students attended classes at the old town hall on the Village Green, with North Royalton High School conferring diplomas to two proud students in the inaugural class of 1907. Students who wished for a fourth year of high school would have to take a wagon to Parma and then a streetcar to Lincoln High in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood to receive such a privilege. As North Royalton grew in the mid-part of the 20th-century, becoming more suburban than rural and shedding its past as a small agricultural and dairy community, the original high school was torn down, and a new modern high school opened in 1952.

As you look at the newly renovated stadium and overcrowded board offices today, as well as the hulking, modern middle school and high school around the corner, it is hard to imagine a time when North Royalton was something other than a bustling suburb of Cleveland. Safe to say, the community has grown and changed much in the past 100 years. Something as simple as the evolution of a high school can illustrate this.

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Cleveland Heights High School, referred to simply as "Heights," originated in 1901 on the site of the present-day Boulevard Elementary School, near the intersection of Lee Road and Euclid Heights Boulevard. Cleveland Heights High School's first graduating class, in 1907, numbered just five students. The school soon became too small for the growing student body and a new Cleveland Heights High School, designed by Walker and Weeks and fronting Lee Road just north of Euclid heights Boulevard, opened in 1916. It too was soon deemed inadequate.

The current Cleveland Heights High School at Cedar and Lee Roads was constructed in 1926, with the previous school rechristened Roosevelt Junior High. The new "Heights" was built to resemble a Tudor castle, featuring a clock tower and high columns that framed a grand main entrance. Architects and school officials tried to make sure that the new school would be large enough to accommodate the ever-growing district's needs. Indeed, a headline from a few months before the school's opening declared, "New Heights High Dwarfs Old One." The same article commented on the school's "mammoth stage" and marveled at the fact that "wires for a radio have been put in every room with a central apparatus in the office to relay outside programs." When it opened, the school was called "one of the most beautiful and commodious school edifices in Greater Cleveland."

Nonetheless, expansions to Heights High over the years were necessary to accommodate a student body that at one time approached 3,000. Perhaps the most noticeable of these changes occurred in the 1960s when a new "Science Wing" added along Cedar Road closed off the front of the school, creating an interior courtyard. As enrollment is now much lower (1,700), this long-controversial segment of the school was removed as part of a massive renovation completed in 2017.

Heights High has always been known for its excellent academics, particularly in the music and drama departments. Still, many methods of education have necessarily changed. In 2004, Heights became a pilot school for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Small Schools movement, dividing the one big school into five small schools based on different learning styles and areas of focus. The experiment ended in 2015 when the small schools dissolved in favor of returning to a comprehensive high school.

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Cleveland's Catholic schoolchildren began attending parochial schools in their neighborhoods during the 1850s, opting to avoid the public school system which many saw as being anti-Catholic. These first Catholic schools were merely grammar schools, however, and did not offer advanced education. Cleveland's Catholic population continued to grow in the last quarter of the 19th-century with an influx of Catholic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe joining the Irish and Germans already in town. Recognizing the growing need for better and more extensive Catholic education in the city, Bishop Richard Gilmour invited a group of Jesuits priests from Buffalo to start a Catholic college on the city's near west side.

St. Ignatius College opened with 76 students in 1886 in a wood-framed building at West 30th Street and Carroll Avenue. Its five-story brick main building (which remains standing today) did not open until 1890. Initially, St. Ignatius offered a seven year course of study which ended with the granting of a Bachelor of Arts degree. A 1905 book on education in Cleveland explained that a student at the college could expect to take courses on "Christian doctrine, the Latin, Greek, and English languages; rhetoric, poetry, elocution, and English literature; mathematics, physics, and chemistry; history and geography; bookkeeping and penmanship." The seventh year of instruction was dedicated exclusively to the study of philosophy.

In 1902, the high school and college became separate entities, resulting in a more modern arrangement. In 1935 the college, which switched its name to John Carroll University in 1923, moved to its own campus in suburban University Heights. St. Ignatius High School remained in Ohio City and has since expanded outward from its original building, with its campus now clustered along both sides of Lorain Avenue between West 28th and West 32nd Streets. It is known for its excellent academics, championship-winning sports teams, and community service within Ohio City.

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Shaw High School in East Cleveland opened in 1838 thanks to a donation made by Sarah Shaw after the death of her husband John. Since they had no children, she decided to give back to her rural community by donating some of the family's farmland for use as a school yard. Since then, Shaw High School has taken a number of physical forms, but it continues to be located on the Shaw's old farmland along upper Euclid Avenue.

Shaw Stadium — a half-mile northwest of Shaw High — was built in 1923 and served as the home of the National Football League's Cleveland Rams (the city's first professional football team) in 1938. Spectators at football games there today are sure not to miss a performance from Shaw High School's world-renowned Mighty Cardinal Marching Band. In 2008, the band made headlines after traveling to China to perform at ceremonies for the Beijing Summer Olympics.

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Land for the Cleveland Public School District's new commercial high school was originally acquired in 1907 along East 107th Street in University Circle. However, disputes and discussions about the nature and design of the new high school in the Cleveland district would ensue for nearly twenty years. By 1926 a Cleveland Press clipping illustrated a labeled photograph of the district property along East 107th Street. Cathedral Latin School and the Normal School are labeled bordering the proposed placement of the new John Hay High School, named for the author, statesman, and political leader John Milton Hay. A Cleveland Plain Dealer article of September 14, 1929, cited the new school opening and dedication at that time. Taking its name from a great American statesman and Cleveland native, John Hay High School was like the school's predecessor, Longwood Commerce High School, focused on business training.

The school was ultimately created as a commercial school providing courses related to commerce, business, and office skills. As a result, enrollment at John Hay was predominantly female for many years to come and enjoyed much success graduating skilled office workers ready for employment. A May 14, 1954, article in the Cleveland Press was headlined "Men-Wanted Sign Out for 25 Years" and cited an 85% female graduate rate since the school's opening in 1929. A gradual redesign of John Hay's curriculum provided for a more comprehensive course of study that began to attract male students during the late 1950s and 1960s. The 'Bookeepers' changed to the 'Hornets' as male and female athletic programs were likewise designed to accommodate students seeking comprehensive studies and activities.

John Hay's reputation would change in time. With its transition to a comprehensive school, new challenges faced the administration, faculty, and students, not dissimilar to other schools in the district facing urban issues of racial and economic discord during the 1960s. The school became the site of student protests, lockouts, and other challenges in the next three decades. Disruptive students were responsible for a fire in the school in January 1968, resulting in 32 student suspensions. That November, students conducted a "wildcat strike" and held an assembly to protest a new discipline policy being imposed at the school. Several other items were on their agenda including lavatory conditions, cancellation of social events, classroom equipment complaints, and building access concerns. A cafeteria fight ensued the next day as school closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. By January 1969, parents, students, teachers, and administrators were disputing problems at the school, alleging drug trafficking, intoxicated teachers, and bad neighborhood influences. By February, more unrest was brewing as students called for "Black Unity." In late February and early March, John Hay was closed for more than six school days following student protests and grievances with the school district. Grievances were resolved and an orderly reopening of the school ensued on March 6.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s as the Cleveland Schools worked to implement a federal desegregation order, John Hay remained a center of action and protest within the district. John Hay was temporarily closed in 2008-09 for remodeling before reopening to serve students as a thematic health care education facility in partnership with the Cleveland Clinic.

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