The story
In 1922, a group of St. Louisans announced their intention to open a private school in a suburb of St. Louis. "This school is being established to meet a very definite demand for another country day school, and is an outgrowth of a condition whereby existing schools are unable to accept all pupils applying for entrance," the St. Louis Star and Times reported.
In "executive charge" of the campaign to build the school was Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a co-founder of the League of Women Voters. The 18-acre site, located on the streetcar line from Clayton, was purchased for $18,000
($340,000 today) and the initial campus buildings, including a gymnasium, were built for $180,000. Tuition was $500 per year, with scholarships available to up to 10 percent of students.
Classes began on Oct. 2, 1923, ahead of a formal cornerstone-laying ceremony the following week. The gym was completed in December at a cost of $38,000; the main speaker at its dedication ceremony was Branch Rickey, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.
The school's founders wrote, "Burroughs was established upon the conviction that each child has latent possibilities of power, and that it is the chief purpose of the school to cooperate with parents in discovering, fostering and developing that power so that in adulthood he shall make his contribution to the improvement of human society. The child's mind is not a tablet to be written upon or a cistern to be filled, but a living, growing entity to be guided, developed, trained and inspired."
In the 1930s, JBS participated in the Eight-Year Study, an experiment that tested how American progressive secondary schools would prepare their students for college when released from the curricular restrictions of college admissions requirements.
In April 2020, the school received $2.5 million in federally backed small business loans as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. The school received scrutiny over this loan, which was meant to protect small and private businesses, and returned the money to the Treasury Department the following month.
The school is fundraising to raise its endowment to $100 million by June 2026.
From Wikipedia’s article on John Burroughs School, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4