Mount Prospect Public School District 57 is a community public school district that serves over 2,000 pre-kindergarten through eighth grade students in Mount Prospect, Illinois, United States, covering an area of 4.3 square miles (11.1 km²).[1]
In the early 1890s, William Busse, a township officer in Mount Prospect started a school district for the town to attract residents. At the time, students in the village attended five different schools in nearby Elk Grove, Maine, and Wheeling townships. William Wille, Mount Prospect's craftsman, donated a plot and sold 3 plots of land for $200 to William Busse. Built by William Wille, the one-roomed Central School opened in 1896 with 7 students attending from the ages of 6 to 14. Because Mount Prospect didn't have a central meeting place or village hall at the time, Central School also became Mount Prospect's social hall, meeting place, and eventual public library. By 1917, enrollment had increased to over 30 students.
In 192], a new four-roomed Central Standard School opened across the street for $25,000 to alleviate overcrowding at the one-room schoolhouse. The original one-room schoolhouse still operated, however, as the district's first kindergarten. In 1937, a $30,000 addition of four more classrooms and a gymnasium were added onto the Central Standard School, and the district sold the original one-room schoolhouse to nearby St Paul's Episcopalian Church for $500.
Between then and 1948, five more additions were put onto the Central Standard School. By this time, about 410 students from kindergarten to Grade 8 attended the school. The year before, 1947, the district opened Lincoln School. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Fairview, Lions Park, Gregory, Sunset, and Busse Schools had opened to alleviate overcrowding. Lincoln received an addition that triped the size of the school in 1956. In 1958, Lincoln received an addition of a boys' and girls' gymnasium, and Grade 7 and Grade 8 students were being taught there. Peak district attendance was around 4,500 kindergarten-Grade 8 students in 1960. By the late 1960s, the schools built in the early 1950s and early 1960s were kindergarten-sixth grade, and Lincoln and Central only taught 7th and 8th grades.
In 1970, Central Junior High School shut down due to dropping attendance, and junior high-schoolers that would have gone there went to Lincoln School, which had recently doubled in size. The Central Junior High School building was demolished in 1975, and the Mount Prospect Public Library was built in its place. Dropping attendances also closed Gregory, Sunset, and Busse Schools by the mid 1980s. Gregory School was sold to Christian Life College and Church; Sunset Park School was sold became many things, including a church, before being sold to the Mount Prospect Park District after over six years of price negotiations and demolished in the mid 1980s; In 1987 the District sold Busse School to the Park District, and was used as a community centre until its' demolition in 1994.
In the mid-1990s, the original Lions Park and Fairview Schools were demolished and replaced, and Westbrook School was sold with a 10-year lease. However, massive overcrowding was taking place in the district by the mid-2000s, and when the lease was up on Westbrook School, the district converted it into a school for preschoolers and kindergarteners. Grade 1 was brought over to Westbrook in 2009.