Most visitors to the Scottsdale Historical Museum go straight to the reconstructed 1910 classroom. The more important history in the building is from the decades after 1910. For about a generation the Little Red Schoolhouse was the Coronado School, and the children in it were Scottsdale’s Mexican-American kids. The Anglo children went to a newer school a few blocks west. The sources describe the arrangement differently, and the difference matters, so here are all three.
1928: two schools
The 1909 brick Scottsdale Grammar School had two classrooms. By the late 1920s the farm town had outgrown it. In September 1928 the district opened a new Scottsdale Grammar School on the southwest corner of Second Street and Marshall Way. It was a one-story Spanish Colonial Revival building by the local firm Lescher and Mahoney, and 594 students in grades one through eight attended its first year, according to the Scottsdale Artists’ School, which occupies the building now. In the early 1950s, when the district adopted Native American names for its schools, it became Loloma (see why Scottsdale’s schools and parks carry Native names).
The old brick building on Main Street got a new name too: the Coronado School.
Three accounts of who went there
The Scottsdale Historical Society, which runs the museum, calls it “a transitional school for Grades 1–3 for immigrant children, who then transferred to Scottsdale Grammar School.” In that version, Coronado was a starting point, and the children moved on to the main school once they had their footing.
This site’s schoolhouse guide, written from earlier sources, says the building was used for Mexican-American children in roughly the first three grades. It calls that what it was, a segregated arrangement, and notes that the building also served as a community center for Mexican-American families.
The City of Scottsdale’s 2012 historic context, A Modern Dynamic City, 1961–1979, is the bluntest: “At some point the district made the Little Red Schoolhouse, then called Coronado School, the public school for Hispanics and other non-White children and Loloma became the school for White (Anglo) children.”
The accounts overlap but aren’t the same. “Transitional” and “immigrant” frame Coronado as being about language. The city frames it as being about race, describes a full school rather than the first three grades, and leaves the start date open with “at some point.” The children were the same in every version: the sons and daughters of the barrio a few blocks east of Brown Avenue, many of them born in Arizona. Arcadia’s description of José María Burruel’s Mexicans in Scottsdale, the one book about that community, names “Coronado School, now the home of the Scottsdale Historical Museum” as one of the few buildings left that “attest to the neighborhood’s original inhabitants.” The barrio counted it as theirs.
Our reading is that all three can be true at different times. An early-grades “transition” arrangement could have hardened into a separate school by race. Without the school board’s minutes, though, that is a reading, not a finding.
How it ended
Arizona got there before the Supreme Court did. The city’s context records that the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity, with support from Barry Goldwater and Lincoln Ragsdale, pushed for a state law against school segregation in 1951 and 1952, and that its lawsuit produced a 1953 court decision declaring school segregation laws illegal, a year before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. By the time Scottsdale became a charter city in 1961, its schools “were already integrated by law.”
The building’s own dates are less tidy. The district’s chronology, reproduced in the city’s context, lists the 1909 school as closing in 1956, then used as the library, the Chamber of Commerce offices and the museum. The same document says the town’s offices moved into the building in 1955. Either the classrooms and the town hall shared it for a year, or one of the dates is approximate. The record we have doesn’t say which.
The building’s later dates conflict too. The city says the library moved in after the town’s offices left for the Triangle Building in 1960. Our schoolhouse guide gives 1963 to 1968 for the library years. Our guide also dates the Historical Society to 1969. The society’s own account has residents organizing and petitioning in 1968 and incorporating in December 1969, so both years are right for different steps.
Loloma kept teaching until the late 1970s. The city’s table says it closed in 1977–78 and served as a skills center from 1976 to 1981. The Artists’ School says it closed as a school at the end of the 1980–81 year. The Scottsdale Artists’ School moved in in 1993.
What the record doesn’t show
Nobody has published the basic facts: who decided, in what year, by what rule, how many children, and when it stopped. Here is where those answers are:
- School board minutes, 1928–1956, from Scottsdale’s school district (then School District No. 48). Ask Scottsdale Unified’s district office, or look in the school district records at the Arizona State Archives. A policy assigning children by race or language would be written down there, and so would its end.
- Enrollment by school. The Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction’s reports from the 1930s and 1940s, also at the State Archives, would show how many children attended Coronado and Scottsdale Grammar each year.
- People who went there. Burruel’s book is built on interviews with a dozen families. The descendants’ group that met at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in 2019 included people born in the barrio. Anyone who started first grade at Coronado in the late 1940s would be in their mid-80s now, so this is the record that is running out fastest.
- The museum. The Historical Society’s photograph collection and oral histories. Ask at the desk. The volunteers know more than the wall text says.
See it
The two buildings are a short walk apart, and walking between them makes the point. Start at the Little Red Schoolhouse, 7333 E. Scottsdale Mall (free; closed Mondays, Tuesdays and all summer). Stand in the classrooms and remember that, for a generation, the children here were the ones the town had sorted out. Then walk west to Second Street and Marshall Way and look at the red-tile-roofed Spanish Colonial building that is now the Scottsdale Artists’ School, built in 1928 for the other children. Finish at the Old Adobe Mission on Brown Avenue, which the Coronado School’s families built by hand in 1933.
For the neighborhood those children came from and what happened to it, read The Barrio Under the Civic Center. For the rest of the town’s color line in the 1950s, read Scottsdale and the Color Line.