After the local community lost in an attempt to save the original school building, demolition began in 2012[6] and was finished in 2014.

[7] From the high school's founding until the 1981 school year, the football team was officially named the "Pekin Chinks", represented by a red dragon logo, done in part to represent the town of Pekin's wrongly supposed relation to the Chinese city of Peking.

By the 1990s, some graduates from the pre-dragon era of the district have expressed a desire for the original name to return, despite being criticized for being degrading, racist, and lacking common decency.

[12][13] In April 2019, a web page on the website IdentifyEvropa connected Kevin Pummill, a PCHS social studies teacher, to messages under the name "Undercover Academic" on an Internet site of white supremacist group Identity Evropa.

The district superintendent said that the school confirmed that "the teacher made a number of troubling and offensive posts" on an Internet site.

The superintendent later said that "the school is not aware of any instances of discriminatory conduct against students by the teacher" as of 22 April 2019[update] but did not say whether the investigation was complete.