Launching A New Campus School

As planning for the new building got under way the Board selected the Des Moines based architectural firm of Tinsley, Higgins and Lighter to develop the design for the long-anticipated structure. Burdette Higgins, the architect assigned to the project, conferred with College and Campus School staff, coming to Cedar Falls for several days on four different occasions to review and collaboratively revise interior and exterior plans suggested by school personnel. Subsequently, Dr. William Chase, Assistant to the Head of the Department of Teaching, and E. E. Cole, Director of the Physical Plant at ISTC, worked closely with architects and contractors to develop the master plan for a school to be built in three stages, which would ultimately serve approximately eight hundred school-age students and hundreds of prospective teachers annually.

Construction of section “A,” the elementary school, began in July 1950 and it was ready for occupancy by the fall of 1953. The new structure included nursery and kindergarten rooms and office; elementary classrooms and offices; English, speech, and music rooms with offices; nursing and consultative services suites; a library; an auditorium; a staff room; and administrative offices. Two years later in the fall of 1955 middle and high school students moved into section ”B,” which housed classrooms and offices for mathematics, business education, home economics, language and industrial arts, science and social sciences, driver education, and stage craft and dressing rooms for the support of dramatic and musical productions. 

By the fall of 1957 section “C,” the fieldhouse, was ready for use, which provided physical education facilities for the entire student body including a basketball court, training and regulation swimming pools, an indoor track and field area, wrestling room, dressing and locker rooms, first aid station, and staff offices. The gross floor space of the completed school was approximately 156,200 square feet and had been constructed at a cost of roughly $2,376,675.00. The building was situated on a campus of approximately 21.5 acres at the corner of Campus and Nineteenth Streets where there was abundant parking for faculty, staff, and visitors and playground facilities for nursery-kindergarten and elementary aged children. Plans were underway for the construction of five tennis courts, a football practice field, a quarter-mile track, an archery range, baseball fields, and a general recreation area for middle and high school students.

Although he had decided to leave administration and return to the classroom before construction had actually gotten under way, no individual had played a greater role in realizing the dream of a new campus school than Malcolm P. Price who served as President of Iowa State Teachers College from 1940 to 1950. Price had skillfully led the college through the traumatic years of World War II as it maintained a smaller but successful teacher education program while simultaneously serving thousands of military personnel and had guided it throughout the monumental struggle to accommodate the flood of GIs that poured on to campus in the immediate post-war era. Yet, despite the challenges of the turbulent forties, Price never lost sight of his vision of ISTC as the premier professional school for the training of Iowa’s teachers and of the importance of a state-of-the-art campus school as an integral part of that vision. Consequently, in recognition of his distinguished service to the college and ultimate success in securing funding for a new campus school, on March 23, 1959, ISTC and Cedar Falls formally dedicated the new facility as the Malcolm Price Laboratory School, which would serve the local community, state of Iowa, and relevant educational interests across the nation for the next fifty-three years. 

The planning for, and construction of, a new school building absorbed much time and energy on campus and generated considerable interest in both the ISTC and Cedar Falls communities throughout the early post-war era. Simultaneously, many other less immediately obvious but fundamentally more important dynamic changes were under way in the operations and functions of the school as it completed its three-quarter-century transition from model, to training, and finally to laboratory school. The brochure prepared for the formal dedication of PLS in the early spring of 1959 illuminates both pride in the new building and in the way in which the faculty, staff, and students were adapting to and shaping their expanding mission.

The brochure pointed out that PLS was a community school and reported a dramatic increase in enrollment in recent years. The student population had risen to around eight hundred by the late 1950s with about three-quarters of them drawn from the southwestern corner of Cedar Falls and another quarter from adjacent formerly rural districts. This growth necessitated the hiring of additional teachers, which was done with considerable care given the instructional and research expectations of a laboratory school serving public school-aged students, college-level teacher trainees, and educational interests across the state and nation. About one-third of the faculty had a doctorate and roughly another third had at least one year of graduate study beyond the master’s degree, which afforded ample opportunities for the infusion of new ideas and practices and facilitated more emphasis on research and experimentation. By the late fifties the organization of the school had evolved to “include departmental chairmen in all teaching fields, each responsible for the curriculum and instruction in his particular field in both the elementary and secondary school. Consultants in reading, speech, guidance, arithmetic, audio-visual education, safety education, and a full-time nurse were added to the staff.”