Racine's first schoolhouse was a frame structure opened and taught by Mr. Bradley in 1836. However, the formal establishment of four school districts in the county came the next year. School District No. 1 included the Town and Village of Racine and the first brick school was built in 1842. Subsequent boundary reorganizations occurred, including one in 1845 which saw the village subdivided into three districts. In 1852, one district was formed within the corporate limits of the city and the Mayor and City Council appointed two commissioners from each city ward to serve as the School Board. A City Superintendent was elected by the public and served for one year. The high school, which received state legislative approval in 1852 and opened a year later, was the first in Wisconsin.
In 1959, the Wisconsin legislature decreed that school districts without high schools must either establish one or consolidate with a district operating one. It also passed a law permitting the creation of a unified school district. In a move which became a national model for school consolidations, a Racine citizens' committee formed in 1960 to study school consolidation in eastern Racine County. It recommended a unified school district with central administration and a nine-member school board. The committee's recommendations were unanimously endorsed by the Wisconsin Department of Instruction, Racine City Council, and twenty-four small school districts which consolidated to form Unified School District No. 1 (later Racine Unified School District). The new district had a student population of 25,000 students in 1965. By the 1975-76 school year, the district included 28,757 students, about 1,450 teachers, 34 elementary schools, 8 junior high schools, and five high schools.
Racine schools saw incorporation of music and art into the curriculum in 1870. The first kindergarten opened in 1893 and ideation for a grade 7-9 junior high school, which occurred in 1919, cumulated in construction of Wm. McKinley Junior High School in 1921. Team teaching was introduced in the district in 1954. Many innovations came about in the 1960s and 1970s. These included Head Start, Follow-through programs, non-graded classes, Black studies, modular scheduling, an alternative high school, and a bilingual education program for Latino students.
The Racine Unified School District once again served as a national model with its much-publicized voluntary school desegregation. Between 1960 and 1970, minority population in Racine more than doubled to eleven percent with the minority school population reaching twenty percent. Thus, when J. I. Case High School opened in 1966 minority students were assigned and bused to the new facility to equalize minority population percentages in the other two high schools. A similar tactic was taken after construction of Gifford Junior High.
The Racine Board of Education went on record in 1968, “to take specific action to erase undesirable cultural-ethnic-racial imbalances.” Five years later, it passed a resolution that no school would have more than ten percent above the total minority student percentage figure in the district. A broad-based citizens advisory committee helped create a district redistribution plan which was adopted in 1974. Upon the recommendation of this committee, the district opened three magnet schools to provide parents with a wider choice of schools for their elementary-aged children. Red Apple School opened in 1974 with an open classroom concept and the Fine Arts School and Fundamental School opened in 1975, both housed within Stephen Bull Elementary School.
Six of Racine's school superintendents actively created the records in this series. A. H. Schafer held the position from approximately 1921 to 1952, followed by Ernest Lake (serving from 1952 to 1959), John Prasch (1959 to 1966), John Gunning (1967 to 1970), C. Richard Nelson (1970 to 1982), and Don Woods (1982 to 1991).
