Stanton College Preparatory School in Jacksonville, Florida

Stanton College Preparatory School is a public magnet high school run by Duval County Public Schools at 1149 W 13th St, Jacksonville, FL 32209.

The school's Duval County Public Schools home page says that in 1981 Stanton became Duval's first magnet school, and that it offers two programs, Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB), with all core courses available at the Honors or AP level. It also lists a Career and Technical Education program in Computer Science, Blue Devils athletics and student activities, and gives the school's phone number as 904-630-6760.

Two Stanton buildings stand in Jacksonville. The working school is on West 13th Street. The three-story brick schoolhouse of 1917, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Edwin M. Stanton High School, sits at 521 W. Ashley St. in LaVilla, on the block where the school began.

The school began in 1868, when the Trustees of the Florida Institute bought a 1.5 acre city block in Jacksonville to use for education.

The National Register nomination for the 1917 building says the trustees were a society dedicated to providing educational opportunities for former slaves and free blacks, and that they bought the block from Ossian B. Hart in 1868. Hart, who became the first native of the state elected governor, conditioned the sale on the land being used only for education, so the site served from 1869 until 1971 as the continuous location of schools for Black children in Jacksonville.

In December 1868 the trustees arranged with the Freedmen's Bureau to erect a school on the property. On April 10, 1869 the original building was dedicated and named the Stanton Normal School in honor of Edwin M. Stanton, an outspoken abolitionist and Secretary of War in the Cabinet of Abraham Lincoln. The nomination says the school was described as the largest and finest school edifice in the state, and that in its first year it enrolled 348 students taught by six teachers. By the mid-1870s it was one of only three Black secondary schools in Florida, with the largest enrollment of the three, and former President Ulysses S. Grant included it in his 1877 tour of Florida.

Fire destroyed the first building in early 1882 and the second on May 3, 1901, and the trustees and the community rebuilt each time on the LaVilla block.

After the 1882 fire, the nomination says, the trustees built a new brick building with insurance money, and on May 1, 1882 they signed a long term lease with the Duval County Board of Public Instruction to maintain a school for Black children. That second Stanton School stood until May 3, 1901, when the great fire destroyed most of downtown Jacksonville. The school reopened in February 1902 in a third building that was inferior to both earlier ones; principal James Weldon Johnson described it as a hideous structure that looked more like a mill or granary than a school house.

Johnson had been a pupil at Stanton, and his mother, Helen Louise Johnson, taught there. He returned as principal in 1894, when the school had the largest enrollment of any school of either race in Jacksonville. During his tenure from 1894 to 1902 he expanded the program from nine to twelve grades and, with his brother Rosamond, wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing. In 1914 the chief of the Jacksonville Fire Department condemned the 1902 building as a fire hazard.

Black residents and the Stanton trustees sued the Duval school board in 1915, and the settlement produced the brick Stanton High School that opened in the fall of 1917.

The nomination says the trigger was a $1 million bond issue in 1915 for Duval County school buildings, under which the school board planned to eliminate Stanton and replace it with three smaller buildings elsewhere. The trustees and other representatives of the Black community petitioned the board on February 23, 1915 for a fairer share of the bond money and a better building on the same site. When the board refused, they filed for an injunction in circuit court. In an out of court settlement in September 1915, the board agreed to build the present Stanton High School on the same site and to erect additional schools in other parts of the city.

The nomination calls the suit the first documented example of Black residents of Jacksonville seeking equal educational opportunities through legal action. When it was built, the 1917 building was the only secondary school for Black students in Duval County. Its architect, Mellen C. Greeley, designed a three-story brick building with a T-shaped plan that extends 240 feet along Ashley Street.

In September 1953 New Stanton High School opened on West Thirteenth Street in Jacksonville, and in 1981 the school became Duval's first magnet school.

According to the nomination, the original Stanton High School building was then used as a junior high and later converted into Stanton Vocational High School, which remained until 1971, when the building was vacated. The district page dates the magnet school to 1981 and describes academic programs for highly motivated and academically talented students that prepare them for college-level courses and the chance to earn college credits.

Stanton College Preparatory earned an A in the Florida Department of Education's 2025-26 school grades, with 87 percent of possible points.

The FDOE school grades file, dated as of September 1, 2026, lists Stanton under Duval as school number 1531, a high school, and records an A for 2026, 2025 and 2024. For high schools the department's scale sets an A at 65 percent of points or greater. Figures below are from the Duval County row of the same file.

The 1917 building on Ashley Street in LaVilla is on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2026 the Jacksonville City Council approved city grant money to Historic Stanton, Inc. to repair it.

The National Park Service asset record lists the property, NRIS ID 83001446, with a publication date of 9/29/1983 and names James Weldon Johnson as a significant person. When the form was written in 1983, the building had stood vacant since 1971, and its owners, the Board of Trustees of Stanton High School, were planning to adapt it as a multi-use community center.

City Council records in the Jacksonville City Council legislation database show Ordinance 2026-0260-E, introduced on April 14, 2026 by Council Member Johnson, which appropriates $143,710 from General Fund operating reserves for a grant to Historic Stanton, Inc. for improvements to the building and allows an advance payment of up to 25 percent. The council approved it 16-2 on May 12, 2026, with Diamond and Carrico voting no. A second measure, Ordinance 2026-0688-E, extends the grant agreement to expire on 9/30/27; the council approved it 17-1 on September 22, 2026.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Stanton page on the Duval County Public Schools site, the FDOE 2026 school grades file, the National Register nomination and asset record for the Edwin M. Stanton School, and Jacksonville City Council legislation records.