Mount Pleasant High School (Delaware)
Mount Pleasant High School (MPHS) is a public secondary school located in unincorporated New Castle County, Delaware, United States. MPHS was the first public high school in Delaware to offer the International Baccalaureate program. History. After Delaware passed the Free School Act in 1829, the state began pulling together their first public school system; the very first school in Mount Pleasant, located in School District #2, was built soon after. The original schoolhouse still stands today and is located on an acre of land now part of Bellevue State Park. The community continued to grow  and required a larger school, so in 1865, a new building was built near Mount Pleasant Methodist Church. This new school taught grades one through eight and gradually added nine through twelve as the students aged. In 1932, they required even more space; what is now Mount Pleasant Elementary School was built to accommodate the still-growing population and named the Mount Pleasant School. However, only grades one through nine were offered. By 1947, enough families had moved into the area that a separate four-year high school had become a necessity, so Mount Pleasant School transitioned into Mount Pleasant  Senior High School and the lower grades were split between Silverside and Edgemoore Elementary Schools. Construction of a new high school building began in 1953 and, in September 1958, MPHS moved to its current location on Washington. The school celebrated its 175th anniversary in a series of events during homecoming weekend, October 14 and 15, 2005, including the inaugural Mount Pleasant Hall of Fame. Academics. In 2021, "US News and World Report" ranked MPHS #2,885 of more than 24,000 high schools nationally. MPHS' graduation rate for the 2018-2019 academic year was 90%. Athletics. MPHS offers football, cheerleading, cross country , field hockey, boys' and girls' soccer, unified flag football, girls and boys' volleyball, boys' and girls' basketball, swimming, indoor track, unified basketball, wrestling, baseball, golf, boys' and girls' lacrosse, softball, boys' and girls' tennis, track & field, and unified track & field. They compete in the Blue Hen Conference, Flight A. Activities. Mount Pleasant is home to WMPH 91.7 FM, which began broadcasting on October 1, 1969 and was Delaware's only public high school radio station until Thomas McKean High School began broadcasting at WHMS 88.1 FM in 1998. Some of the clubs offered at MPHS are Army JROTC, Black Student  Union, Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, Girls Empowered, National Honor Society, VoluntHeroes, and yearbook. Mount Pleasant puts on a fall play and a spring musical every year; past productions include "Midsummer/Jersey" (fall 2015), "Ragtime" (spring 2016), "Peter/Wendy" (fall 2016), "Oklahoma!" (spring 2017), "The Crucible" (fall 2017), "Mary Poppins" (spring 2018), "Almost, Maine" (fall 2018), "Pippin" (spring 2019), "The Laramie Project" (fall 2019), and "Chicago" (spring 2020 - postponed due to COVID-19). MPHS' music department offers concert bands, jazz band, marching band, choral, guitar, guitar quartet, early music ensemble, music technology and composition, Music Boosters Association, chorale, concert  choir, treble choir, and show choir.