duPont Manual High School is a public magnet high school located in the Old Louisville neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It serves students in grades 9–12. It is a part of the Jefferson County Public School District. DuPont Manual is recognized by the United States Department of Education as a Blue Ribbon School.
Manual, funded by Mr. A. V. duPont, opened in 1892 as an all-male manual training school. It was the second public high school in Louisville. Manual merged with its rival, Male High School, into a consolidated school from 1915 to 1919. Manual permanently merged with the Louisville Girls High School in 1950 and moved into their Gothic-style three-story building, built in 1934. In 2004, after conducting a poll, Louisville's Courier-Journal newspaper listed Manual as one of Louisville residents' ten favorite buildings. Manual experienced a decline in discipline and test scores in the 1970s. In 1984, Manual became a magnet school, allowing students from throughout the district to apply to five specialized programs of study, or magnets.
Manual and Male High School have the oldest football rivalry in the state, dating back to 1893. Manual's football team has won five state titles and claims two national championships. In the 1980s and 1990s Manual became a prominent academic school and has been included several times in lists of America's top high schools in Redbook and Newsweek magazines. The high school has been recognized as a Perennial Top Academic School in Kentucky and holds the most national merit semi-finalists among all JCPS High Schools.
History
duPont Manual Training High School In 1892, Louisville factory owner Alfred Victor du Pont donated $150,000 to the board of Louisville Public Schools to establish a training school to teach young men industrial arts ("manual") skills that would fit them for their duties in life. The Victorian building was built on the corner of Brook and Oak Streets by the firm of Clark and Loomis, which also designed the Speed Art Museum and Waverly Hills Sanatorium. After Manual moved out of the building it was used as a Middle School until 1974 when it was converted to apartments. Manual's first principal, Henry Kleinschmid, was a favorite of duPont but was unpopular with the school board, which conspired to replace him in 1895. Despite a summer of controversy and protest from the duPont family, Manual's first two graduating classes and the four major local newspapers, the board replaced him with Harry Brownell on July 2.
Manual was initially a three-year school with some general academic classes and an emphasis on mechanical and industrial training. Although graduates recall the school being viewed as blue-collar and academically inferior to Male High School in its early days, numerous early graduates went on to become medical doctors, and students published a literary magazine called The Crimson from 1899 to 1955. In order to accommodate newly added French and Latin classes, Manual was expanded to a four-year school in 1901. In 1911, Manual became the first school in Kentucky to serve lunches to students.
In 1913, Louisville Public Schools announced a plan to merge Manual and its rival Male High School into Louisville Boys High so that the two schools could share a new $300,000 facility. The plan took effect in 1915. Industrial training classes continued at the old Manual building. Parents objected to their children having to travel between the two buildings and the consolidation did not save the school board any money, so they voted to end the experiment in 1919. The new building became Male's home for the next 70 years and Manual returned to its old building at Brook and Oak. In 1923 an expansion added new laboratories, a cafeteria, and the largest gym ever built in Louisville at the time. The addition eventually burned and had to be destroyed in 1991.
Manual's enrollment numbers, which had hovered around 400 since the 1890s, soared from 429 in 1919 to 1,039 in 1925. The Manual Crimsons football team, which had also been consolidated with Male's from 1915 to 1918, had great success in the 1920s, beating Male two years in a row for the first time in its history. Manual shared athletic facilities with Male for many years, but in the early 1920s alumni raised funds to construct Manual Stadium. The stadium opened in 1924 with 14,021 permanent seats. It was one of the largest high school stadiums in America at the time. The original structure was condemned and closed in 1952 after years of heavy use and minimal upkeep, and was reopened after being rebuilt in 1954. Its modern capacity is 11,463.
Louisville Girls High School The Louisville Girls High School opened as Female High School in 1856 at what became the intersection of Armory Place and Muhammad Ali Boulevard. It was the female counterpart to Male High School, also opened in 1856, and they were the first two public high schools in Louisville. Female High School moved to a location on First Street north of Chestnut in 1864 and remained there until 1899 when it moved to a location at Fifth and Hill Streets. It changed its name to Louisville Girls High School in 1911.
In 1934, the school moved into Reuben Post Halleck Hall, which had just been completed. The building was initially home to the Girls High School on the second and third floors, and Louisville Junior High School on the first. Over 12,000 women graduated from the school in its 94 years of operation.
Merger By the 1940s, budget concerns and national trends made it clear that Louisville Girls High School and duPont Manual would merge into one coeducational school. They finally did so in September 1950 and remained in the old Louisville Girls High School building. This fusion of institutions resulted in the birth of the modern duPont Manual High School – dropping 'Training' from its previous name. The same school building remains in use today, although two major additions have since been made. The middle school located on the building's first floor became Manly Junior High and moved to Manual's old building at Brook and Oak.
The merged school began developing traditions such as Homecoming in 1951, and Red and White Day in 1953. Red and White Day eventually became a full week of school spirit related activities preceding the annual Male-Manual football game. Two traditions of the sexually segregated past, sororities and the all-male Mitre Club, persisted into the 1950s as unofficial organizations but gradually faded away. Students began publishing a newspaper, The Crimson Record, in 1955.
Following the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Manual became racially integrated without controversy in 1956 and graduated its first two black students in 1958. Starting in the 1960s, Manual began to face problems associated with inner city schools in the United States as economically advantaged families moved towards Louisville's suburbs. Manual was exempt from court-ordered busing in the 1970s because its racial makeup already met federal guidelines.
On November 11, 1976, what school board members referred to as a race-related riot occurred on campus, injuring 16 and leading to six arrests and 60 suspensions. Students and school administrators agreed that there was an atmosphere of racial tension brewing at Manual in the 1970s that led to the riot. In his 2005 book on the history of Manual, Mike McDaniel wrote that November 11, 1976 was "quite probably the worst day in the history of Manual."McDaniel Stand Up and Cheer, p. 196
The late 1960s and 1970s were a time of major change at Manual. A new wing featuring a gym with a seating capacity of 2,566 opened in 1971. The school had as many as 3,360 students in the 1971–72 school year, necessitating 17 portable classrooms in the front and rear courtyards. Manual still had grades seven through twelve at this time, and overcrowding gradually began to improve after Manual dropped the seventh and eight grades when Noe Middle School opened in 1974. Throughout the decade the administration gradually dropped the last vestiges of its manual training emphasis as the number of shop classes dwindled from 16 in 1971 to three in 1979. The Youth Performing Arts School, actually a magnet school within Manual, opened in 1978 and, along with the changing curriculum, presaged Manual's transition to an academically intensive magnet school in the 1980s.
Magnet school Manual became a magnet school in 1984, creating specialty programs and allowing students from around the district to apply to attend. The change initially met with a mixed reaction, especially as most freshmen and sophomores were to be transferred to other schools. One critic in the black community called the plan "one-way busing". A few days after the proposal was announced, about 300 students walked out of class at Manual and marched to Central High School, where most of them were being transferred, in protest. The protest succeeded in persuading the school board to modify the proposal to exclude sophomores from being transferred.
The magnet programs succeeded in attracting applicants and by the mid-1990s only about a third of students who applied were accepted.McDaniel Stand Up and Cheer p. 219 In the midst of the transition to magnet school, Manual underwent a $1.9 million building improvement plan which added computer and science labs.McDaniel Stand Up and Cheer p. 212–219 Also in 1991, the United States Department of Education recognized Manual as a Blue Ribbon School, the highest honor the department can bestow on a school. The school earned a Blue Ribbon award again in 2020.
Many interior shots of the 1999 film The Insider were filmed at Manual. Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, the subject of the film, taught science and Japanese at Manual after he was fired by tobacco company Brown & Williamson in 1993.
Building and campus Manual classrooms and offices are located in three buildings spread over two city blocks. The main building was originally called Reuben Post Halleck Hall and was home to the Louisville Girls High School before it merged with Manual. The Gothic-style building was completed in 1934 at a cost of $1.1 million. The tract it was built on had previously been the site of the old Masonic Widows and Orphans Home.
In 1967 an urban renewal program demolished a residential block east of the main building to create a running track and various athletic fields. The project doubled Manual's campus to its modern size of . This was a part of a larger city-funded effort which created Noe Middle School north of Manual and increased the size of the University of Louisville campus, which was originally touted as a plan to create a continuous chain of schools over many blocks. Manual even became a home for two of the university's women's athletic teams. In the 1980s, the U of L women's basketball team used Manual's gym as a part-time home, playing a total of 40 games in eight seasons there. The U of L volleyball team used the Manual gym as its primary home from 1977 through 1990, after which the team moved into the newly built Cardinal Arena on its own campus. In 1992, Manual began a $3.5 million renovation of the main building which included a new roof and a glass-enclosed cafeteria for juniors and seniors.