However, by 1919, many students in south Scarborough had attended Malvern Collegiate Institute in East Toronto, which became a reality in 1922 when Scarboro High School opened its doors with classic specialist Dr. Reginald H. King as principal, three teachers and 116 pupils.

[3] As the architecture of these new schools was simple, functional and unpretentious, the earlier models were sometimes subject to criticism as bearing too close a resemblance to long, low factory buildings.

To attractive well-lighted classrooms have been added new features: beautiful kindergarten classrooms with radiant heating in the floors, libraries, manual training and household science rooms, rooms for nurses and teachers, spacious dual purpose gymnasiums and auditoriums with stages, and modern equipment such as motion picture projectors, tape recorders and even television sets.

[3] With overcrowding at Scarborough Collegiate Institute and Agincourt High School, they were incapable of coping with the crowds of students seeking secondary education.

Then followed in rapid succession the building of four more great secondary schools to meet the need for accommodation for 1,200 more students each year.

In 1959, the David and Mary Thomson Collegiate Institute, a 1,200 pupil school costing $1,728,400.00, was constructed on Lawrence Avenue a short distance west of the first settler's home in the forests of 1796.

Designed as a composite school, it offered a wide variety of courses, Arts and Science, Commercial, Technical and Trades; and it included well equipped vocational shops, gymnasiums, swimming pool, auditorium with professionally lighted and curtained stage, and numerous other modern school facilities.

Like Cedarbrae, the school was equipped with an auditorium with seats, large rounded circular cafeteria, triple gymnasium, swimming pool and several commercial and technical shops.

On Ellesmere and Markham the basic high steel framework and long brick walls of the great new Woburn Collegiate Institute were rising behind the little red brick schoolhouse of 1863, from whose belfry had rung the call to classes that took generations of pupils from the farms of School Section No.6.

The next year, 1964, Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute, built on the ridge overlooking Birch Cliff – which was once the shore of Lake Iroquois in ancient glacial times – and is attached to Birchmount Stadium, and the Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute (formerly O'Sullivan Secondary) on Pharmacy Avenue north of Sheppard, were completed.

Above the great bluffs towering up from the lake at Guildwood Village, where land once sold for six York shillings or seventy-five cents an acre in 1803, the Board of Education acquired fourteen and one-fifth acres at a cost of $303,700 for another school, and there the building of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute was begun in the latter part of 1964.

At the beginning of 1965, on Midland Avenue north of Eglinton, the walls of the Tabor Park Vocational School, named after one of Scarborough's early schoolmasters, were built up to the second story; and work on the new Wexford Collegiate Institute on Pharmacy Avenue north of Lawrence was well advanced.

But while called on to wrestle continually with the accommodation issue, a building programme which never quite catches up with the spiralling growth of the Borough, and a budget requiring a tax levy of nearly 40 million dollars, the Board of 1968 still finds time to escape from the rut of routine business and explore new ground.

Under the far-sighted leadership of its chairman, Muriel A. Clarke, and the dynamic Director of Education, Anson S. Taylor, the Board introduced a concept of new tri-level system of together with a Secondary School on a common campus.

One such campus is now in operation in the Bendale Secondary School area; and a yet more imaginatively conceived three-school community was under construction on the Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute site on Birchmount Road north of Sheppard Avenue as well as Sir Oliver Mowat Collegiate Institute on Lawrence and Centennial in Rouge Park.

The program was designed for students with twenty-day suspensions, the maximum period possible, in the former Highbrook Senior Public School facility.

The amenities each school had one double gymnasium (with or without stages), cafetoriums or cafeterias, science labs, lockers and shops.

Three former SBE have been lease out: The board's administrative offices were located at 140 Borough Drive within the Scarborough Civic Centre.