Edina Public Schools

[1] In November 2003, residents of the city of Edina passed an $85.8 million bond referendum to renovate some of the school facilities in the district.

[4] It was a one-room, white frame building built at Code's Corner, which today is occupied by Normandale Lutheran Church at West 62nd Street and Minnesota State Highway 100.

At the time it was evident that Edina was still a farming town, since school vacations coincided with spring planting and fall harvesting so the children could help in the fields.

In the mid-1860s, a number of Irish families began settling on the farms around the Edina Mill and decided they needed a school for their children.

This development or mistake creating a new need to expand the elementary system a few years later at a great cost to the district.

So, in February 1872, the officers of school district 17 voted to move the one-room schoolhouse one mile (1.6 km) north to the present site of Edina's City Hall.

The school had 12 classrooms for eight elementary grades, an auditorium that seated 1,110 people, a library, kitchen, cafeteria, and private offices for the teachers.

The new Edina-Morningside Junior High, later to be renamed South View, opened in September 1956 with 680 seventh- and eighth-graders.

Construction was slowed during the early phases because several unmarked graves were found on the site and needed to be moved and re-buried.

In 1972, the school was renamed Edina West - Lower division when a second senior high school, called Edina West - Upper Division, opened on a site adjacent to and just north of the original Valley View building.

The space occupied by the Edina Kindergarten Center became the Normandale Elementary French Immersion School.

[5] Since 1993, three options for elementary programs have been available to parents of entering kindergarten students: continuous progress, neighborhood, or French Immersion.

There are five neighborhood elementary schools: Concord, Countryside, Creek Valley, Highlands and Cornelia, generally serving children who live nearby, in addition Normandale, the French Immersion option that serves enrolled children from the entire school district.

Generally, 6th to 8th grade students who live west of Minnesota Highway 100 attend Valley View Middle School and students who live east of Highway 100 attend South View Middle School.

Minnesota Highway 100 approximately divides the City of Edina in half in the north south direction.

In the early 1970s, a bond issue was approved by voters to construct a second high school to accommodate the increasing enrollment.

On May 5, 2015, the Edina School Board voted unanimously to conduct a special election bond referendum.