High Jump’s Offices on the Move!

After over 34 years of High Jump’s administrative offices being housed in the Latin School of Chicago, this summer, High Jump has made the big leap to establishing ourselves in a new office space all our own. When High Jump was founded in 1989 by Latin’s former Upper School director Eleanor Nicholson, not only did Latin provide the campus for High Jump students to learn at, but they also generously gave us the office space and administrative support to get High Jump off the ground and grow it into the organization it is today.

Over the intervening three decades, High Jump has undergone tremendous growth. While our 1st Cohort had 16 students at one campus, our recently admitted 35th Cohort is made up of 225 students across three campuses. While High Jump was fully volunteer run at its founding, High Jump now employs an administrative staff of 15 and, at our busiest during the summer months, has over 80 additional part-time employees. All along the way, the Latin School has been an incredible partner and supporter of High Jump, providing us with invaluable contributions as we continued to grow and grow.

Recognizing that High Jump’s staff size and resource needs had begun to outstrip the space and capacity at Latin, High Jump and Latin leadership began a process in 2022 to transition High Jump to administrative independence. This transition has included High Jump taking on the many financial, technological, human resources, and administrative services that Latin has so generously provided to us for so many years, and this transition has culminated this summer with High Jump’s move to our new office space in Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood.

While this move is a big change for us and a bittersweet one as we will miss seeing our wonderful colleagues at Latin every day, one thing is crucially not changing at all: our programmatic relationship with Latin and our other partner schools Francis W. Parker and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Latin, along with Parker and Lab, will continue to serve as the three home bases for High Jump’s Scholars program, supporting over 400 students’ High Jump journeys annually across all three campuses.

As High Jump undertakes this big step that serves as a milestone for our sustainable growth and continued evolution, we do so with total confidence knowing that our partners and community will rally behind us every step of the way as they have done over the past 34 years. We would not be where we are today without the support of our students and families, our alumni, our volunteers, our board members, our Sustaining Leaders Fund members, our individual, corporate and foundation supporters, our advocates, our partner schools, and our community as a whole. And we wanted to give an extra special thank you to the Latin School and everyone who works there and has worked there over the past three decades for helping High Jump change the lives of over 2,900 middle school students in Chicago.

If you have any more questions about our move, you can check out our move FAQs here and also please don’t hesitate to reach out.