New Trier High School
New Trier High School is a public four-year high school whose main campus for sophomores through seniors is in Winnetka, Illinois, United States, with a campus in Northfield, Illinois, for first-year classes and district administration. Founded in 1901, the school serves the Chicago suburbs of Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, and Northfield, as well as parts of Northbrook, Glenview, and unincorporated Cook County. New Trier's seal depicts the Porta Nigra, a symbol of Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The athletic teams are known as the Trevians, an archaic demonym for the people of Trier.
Campuses
New Trier Township High School currently has three campuses. The furthest west campus, New Trier Northfield is located in Northfield, Illinois. It serves Freshman students. New Trier has an eastern campus near Lake Michigan called the Winnetka Campus in Winnetka, Illinois which serves sophomore through senior students. Recently, New Trier opened a third campus in Glencoe, Illinois in 2023 called the Transition Campus which provides students with disabilities "transitional and vocational" training.History
New Trier High School opened on February 4, 1901, welcoming 76 students. In 1913, it became the first American high school with an indoor swimming pool.The first edition of The New Trier News was published in 1920. In 1934, the track and field team won the school's first IHSA state championship. In 1965, the New Trier West Campus opened in the village of Northfield.
In the 1950s, New Trier became the first U.S. high school with an educational, non-commercial FM broadcast license for a radiated station. By 1970, New Trier was home to the nation's first public high school-based CCTV instructional station, ITV, which broadcast educational programming to township elementary schools via microwave signals. Students operated WNTH under a faculty advisor, and ITV was run by students under professional television technical and programming staff.
By 1962, student enrollment was more than 4,000. Some 20 "temporary" trailer classrooms lined the rear of the building, which had been designed for 3,000. To accommodate the growing baby boomer student body, voters approved a referendum for New Trier to purchase 46 acres of land in Northfield. Chicago architecture firm Perkins and Will was selected to design a campus of curricular buildings clustered around a central library and administration building. The resulting modernist design was widely noted in secondary education architecture literature and practice and emulated by Winnetka's Carleton Washburne junior high school several years later.
"New Trier West" opened to first- and second-year students in 1965. What had been "New Trier", at 385 Winnetka Avenue in Winnetka, became "New Trier East". In 1967, New Trier West was dedicated as a separate four-year high school. U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John Gardner keynoted the dedication, which was also attended by U.S. Senator Charles Percy and Congressman Donald Rumsfeld.
Enrollment reached an all-time peak of 6,558 students in 1972. By 1981, enrollment had dropped significantly. As a result, the school board combined the East and West schools and converted New Trier West into a freshman-only campus. The division of first-year students from upper-level students lasted from 1981 to 1985. By then, enrollment had declined enough for the board to bring all students under one roof, close the former New Trier West, and convert the Northfield campus into a community recreation space. The campus later housed a senior center, corporate dormitories, a public swimming pool, and an alternative high school program known as West Center Academy.
The 1987-88 New Trier School Board proposed selling the New Trier West Campus in Northfield to facilitate a $10–12 million renovation project at the East Campus. Their decision to sell the property was based on a demographer's report and a reluctance to raise property taxes to cover the NT East revamp. The demographer, however, expressed caution about relying on predictions that exceeded ten years, stating in part that "... after 10 years, greater risk emerges of unanticipated events invalidating even the most scientifically-based projection methods." Concerned about another spike in population and the need to retain the 42.5 acre Campus for future generations, local citizen advocates formed "The Coalition for the Future of New Trier". In March 1988, the Coalition forced the issue to a referendum, which, backed by broad community support, successfully ratified the Coalition's position. The Campus was retained and subsequently rented to various entities until it was again needed as additional space for a growing NT student population. According to research, the combined New Trier enrollment took less than two decades to exceed 4,000 students. The Coalition has never been acknowledged publicly for its significant role as a catalyst in retaining the 42.5-acre New Trier West Campus.
New Trier was featured in the December 9, 1996, issue of Time in an article entitled "High Times at New Trier High." Among other claims, the article stated that "New Trier kids who smoke pot" were "by all accounts more than three-fifths of the student body," compared with national averages at the time closer to 33%. However, on the school's WNTH radio program, the writer acknowledged that the "three-fifths" claim had been inadvertently rewritten during the editing process in such a way that seemed to imply that more than 60% of New Trier students may be regular users of marijuana, whereas that figure should have been clearly labeled as the portion of students who had ever used marijuana, including many who had used it only once or twice
In 2017, the school neared completion of a $104.9 million renovation and addition project at its East Campus, which replaced three aging buildings on the west side of the campus with the addition of a new student cafeteria, a new library, more than two dozen classrooms for core English, math, social studies, language and business program classes, new art labs, applied arts classroom spaces in the basement for STEM programming, space for the school's radio and broadcasting programming, two green roofs, and two new theaters.
Jonathan Kozol wrote a book called Savage Inequalities in 1991 that discussed the harsh conditions in the poorest school districts in the United States, making a correlation between inequality and racial separation and segregation. In the book, Kozol contrasted New Trier High School's spending per student to impoverished schools within Chicago.
In 2016, Newsweek magazine ranked New Trier as the top open-enrollment high school in Illinois and the 17th best high school in the country.
Governance
New Trier’s current superintendent is Dr. Peter Tragos, who was selected by the Board of Education in November 2024. Tragos, the school’s seventh superintendent since 1931, succeeded Dr. Paul Sally, who served as superintendent from 2017 to 2025. He replaced Dr. Linda L. Yonke, the first woman to hold the position, at the end of June 2017.New Trier has a seven-member elected school board. The current president is Jean Hahn.
Recent superintendents
| Superintendent | Years |
| Peter Tragos | 2025 – Present |
| Paul Sally | 2017 – 2025 |
| Linda Yonke | 2006 – 2017 |
| Henry “Hank” Bangser | 1990 – 2006 |
Board of Education
| Member | Position | First elected | Residence |
| Jean Hahn | President | 2019 | Glencoe |
| Sally Tomlinson | Vice President | 2021 | Winnetka |
| Kimberly Alcantara | Member | 2021 | Wilmette |
| Avik Das | Member | 2021 | Glenview |
| Courtney McDonough | Member | 2023 | Winnetka |
| Sally Pofcher | Member | 2023 | Wilmette |
| Joo Serk Lee | Member | 2025 | Wilmette |
Admissions
In the 2021-22 academic year, New Trier had an enrollment of 2,995 students in grades 10-12 and a student-teacher ratio of 11.7 to 1. Most of the students come from middle or upper-class families, with 3% of students from poor households.Most students identify as white, while 10 percent are Asian, 7 percent are Hispanic, and 5 percent are multiracial. Less than one percent of the student body is Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.
On the freshman campus, were 894 students enrolled in 2021-22. The student-teacher ratio is somewhat lower, at 10.5 to 1. Demographically, the student body is similar to the main campus: 75 percent of students are white, 10 percent are Asian, 9 percent are Hispanic, and 6 percent are multiracial, with members of other groups accounting for less than 1 percent. Three percent of students come from households with income below the income threshold for subsidized school lunches.
Curriculum
New Trier has practiced subject-level grouping for over fifty years. In this system, up to four different levels of difficulty are offered for each academic subject. Level 2E is considered a general level. Levels 2, 3 and 4 are college preparatory, honors, and high honors levels, respectively. Level 5 was reserved for Advanced Placement classes and other college-level classes, such as multivariable calculus and linear algebra, but that level was phased out beginning with the class of 2011. Students may work at different levels in different subjects. Other levels include 8 and 9. Level 8 classes are counted for elective credit and level 9 classes, a combination of level 2, 3, and 4 students are graded as level 3 classes.New Trier offers unweighted and weighted grade point averages ; plus and minus grades are reported on transcripts. In calculating a weighted GPA, grades in a student's coursework are given different values depending on the level in which the grade is earned. For example, an "A" in a 2-level course is weighted at 4.00, while in levels 3 and 4, the values are 4.67 and 5.33, respectively. In 2009, New Trier announced that for the 2010–2011 school year, the level 5 will be eliminated. A.P. classes will be weighted to level 4.