Riley High School

1924 – present

Founded: The school at 1902 Fellows Street, on the city's southeast side, was built as Southeast Junior High School: completed in October 1924, dedicated in March 1925, designed by Ennis R. Austin and Norman Roy Shambleau, and built for about $600,000 — a building 358 feet long and 150 feet deep, as the Historic Preservation Commission's 1992 overview records it. It was renamed for James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, by 1927. Riley, born at Greenfield in 1849 and dead in 1916, had worked as a sign painter in South Bend in 1873, a local tie the city has long told of its poet.

Course: A $100,000 addition in 1929 converted the school into a combined junior-senior high school; its first graduating class, one hundred students, finished in June 1931, and a second class of fifty-eight followed in January 1932. In the fall of 1975 Jackson High School, closed as a high school, merged into Riley: Riley kept Jackson's blue and joined it to its own gold, retiring the purple and gold the school had worn before. The boys' swimming program, founded in 1952, became one of the school's distinctions, its swimmers winning dozens of individual state titles across the decades.

The new building: The old building was demolished and a new Riley completed in the summer of 1999 on the same ground — 375,000 square feet on a 29.5-acre campus, capacity 1,800, built under Superintendent Virginia Calvin's administration. References divide on the seam: the school's standard summary carries "1924 — old Riley; 2000 — new Riley," dating the new building to the 1999–2000 school year it opened. The school stands open; its enrollment was 998 in 2023–24. When Clay High School closed in 2024, Clay's Fine Arts magnet program moved to Riley.

Sources:

1. Historic Preservation Commission of South Bend and St. Joseph County, overview of the Riley building (June 1992) — the Southeast Junior High School of 1924–25, its architects, cost and dimensions, the 1929 addition, and the first classes of 1931 and 1932.
2. The school's standard reference record — the renaming for James Whitcomb Riley, the Jackson merger of 1975 and the joined colors, the new building of 1999 against its "2000" dating, and enrollment of 998 in 2023–24.
3. Aaron Helman's local history account — Riley the sign painter in South Bend in 1873.
4. The Riley Review (student newspaper) — the swimming program's founding in 1952 and its state titles.