Three votes in seven weeks
The argument had been made in December. When the PTA’s play Aaron Slick from Punkin Creek turned away a hundred people and stood another hundred, the Arizona Republican’s Scottsdale column declared that “Scottsdale passed out as a simple country school district and Scottsdale ‘the town’ came into actual being,” and that the night showed “the need of a new high school building with an auditorium with sufficient seating capacity for 500 people.”
On February 11, 1922, 103 parents and taxpayers, “the largest vote ever cast at a school election in this district,” approved a four-year high school, 90 to 13. More than twenty students were leaving the district for high school; “next fall they will be able to remain at home.” On February 25, 110 voters chose the site from four, the plat and price of each posted at the schoolhouse. The tract offered by Charles Miller, the board’s president, a block north of the grammar school, won with 39 votes because sharing teachers between the two schools “would save money.”
The bond
The board, Miller, Walter E. Donn and G. N. Loomis, called the bond election for Saturday, April 1, at the grammar school, from ten in the morning to six at night: $73,000 in $500 bonds at 6 percent, to run twenty years, “for the purpose of purchasing land for a High School site … for erecting a High School building or buildings … for supplying the said High school building or buildings with furniture and apparatus.” The judges were the Rev. V. A. Vanderhoof, Walter P. Smith and Mrs. W. F. Smith, the first woman found serving as a Scottsdale election official.
It carried “by a very large majority,” the paper reported. “The largest number that ever voted at an election in Scottsdale cast votes for it. At the last bond election in this district a number of years ago five votes were cast, so the ballot on Saturday proved how the district has grown.” No count of yes and no was printed. In May the high school’s debating club made the three board members honorary members, “for no school board of this district has ever devoted as much time to the betterment of the school system.”
What came of it
The district hoped to open the building for the 1922–23 school year, and the first graduating class, three students, finished in 1923. Scottsdale High School stood on Indian School Road until 1983. Later accounts say the Miller family donated its ten acres; the 1922 bond to buy the site points to a sale, and the deed has not been read. The 1920s politics chapter puts the vote in the decade’s story, and the year is at 1922.