Between the world wars, as new subdivisions filled out the map of Kansas City, educators built schools to keep up with the growing and moving population. Two new high schools – Southwest and Southeast – would anchor what was then the southern end of Kansas City. In the minds of students, each would create its own version of the mythical Camelot.
First came Southwest, built to serve the upscale neighborhoods that arose in the early 1900s south of Brush Creek and west of Oak Street. Many of the finest of these new areas – of which the Country Club District was one – represented the work of developer J.C. Nichols. Stretching south of Nichols’ exclusive Country Club Plaza, these new neighborhoods lined Wornall Road and Ward Parkway and innumerable curving lanes between. True to Nichols’ plans, the area lured affluent Kansas Citians.
To help maintain them as affluent, the developer ensured that the right kind of schools were available. As a member of the school board, Nichols oversaw the board’s purchase of 15 acres for a new high school along Wornall Road.
From its opening in 1925 at Wornall and 65th Street until late in the 20th century, Southwest High served the youth of its well-set neighborhoods with good teachers, excellent social opportunities, and a strong reputation for preparing them for the best colleges and universities in the country.
So memorable was the experience that one 1940 Southwest graduate, Edward T. Matheny Jr., described his alma mater as a Camelot, the mythical place of happiness in the legends of King Arthur. He told its story in a book, The Rise and Fall of Excellence: The Story of Southwest High School RIP.
Indeed, Southwest boasted an impressive list of graduates, among them tax-preparation magnate and philanthropist Henry Bloch, Nobel prizewinning chemistry researcher Richard Smalley, humorist Calvin Trillin, photographer David Douglas Duncan, film actor Chris Cooper and television and movie actress Ruth Warrick.
Southeast becomes Kansas City's ninth high school
For most of the first half of the 20th century, Kansas City’s southern boundary ran along 77th and 79th streets from the state line east past the Blue River. The school district boundary followed the same line, so Southwest served one corner of the city. By the middle 1930s, subdivisions also multiplied to the east. Paseo High School, opened shortly after Southwest, served that area until it could hold no more students. The Kansas City School Board carved out a district for a new high school, which would be the city’s ninth, and named it Southeast.
At Southeast, the Camelot theme ruled even more explicitly, as 1957 graduate Gene Young recalls. Its teams were the Knights, its yearbook the Crusader, its newspaper The Tower and it maintained a walnut Round Table. All were intended to convey to students a system of strong values and a sense of worth.
The Southeast building itself, which opened for classes in 1938, was built on Meyer Boulevard near the main western entrance to Swope Park. An imposing tower topped by an observation area formed the focal point of the building. The new homes then rising in the Southeast neighborhood, though comfortable, typically cost less than those around Southwest, and Southeast families fell in middle-income brackets.
Integration of Southeast and Southwest
Both Southwest and Southeast opened as all-white institutions and remained that way until the 1950s, when the Kansas City School District began desegregating. With the overturning of restrictions on race in home ownership, and with court rulings encouraging integration of public education, neighborhoods and schools began changing. Meanwhile, in the decades after World War II the city vastly expanded its boundaries, while various legal restrictions of the 1950s locked the Kansas City School District into its prewar borders.
As white families and black families who could afford it left the district, the school system struggled to cope, sometimes on its own and sometimes under the direction of a federal judge. Various educational experiments, including the rebranding of both schools as magnets, have been tried at the Southwest and Southeast buildings since the late 1980s. For a while, the Southwest building was used as a charter school and then for an early-college-campus program. Southeast was turned over to an African-centered education program.
Today, the fates of both schools are up in the air: the charter school Academie Lafayette still hopes to collaborate with Kansas City Public Schools on creating a new school with an International Baccalaureate program. And, Southeast's African-centered program is no longer run by original founders; a new principal takes over the helm in the fall.